How to Use Slushomatic (work in progress)

Slushomatic has three "tabs" - submissions, publications, and documents. Click on any of the tab headers to see the your database entries. To add to any of these databases, choose one of the "Create" options from the Actions menu. To update any of your databse entries, either double-click on the row, or choose "Update Selection" from the Actions menu.

Guide to the Menu Items

Actions menu:

  • Update Selection : Update the database entry that you have selected in the main tabbed panel.
  • Update Author : Update your personal information. This is needed for automating the cover letter and document pages.
  • Create New Submission : Creates a new submission in the database.
  • Create New Publication : Create a new magazine entry in the database.
  • Create New Document : Creates a new document entry in the database.
  • Import Pubs : Imports a data-set of publications from a csv file for quick loading. For format, see file 'conf/import.csv'.

Printing Submissions (and cover pages)

Slushomatic can automatically generate the cover letter and story for printing.

  • Make sure that you have entered your personal information in the "Update Author" menuitem (from the Actions menu).
  • Go into update mode for the submission that you wish to print
  • Click on the "Print" button
  • Check the "submissions" folder in the directory where you installed Slushomatic
  • There should be a seperate PDF file for both the cover letter and the document

Updating Document and Cover letter format

There is a configuration file that allows you to change the format/style of your submission document (i.e; change the font, font size, spacing, position of the address, page header information.) This file is called "format.properties" and is located under the "conf" folder in the directory where you have installed Slushomatic. It is a good idea to keep a backup of the original.

Who to contact for bugs / new features

Please E-Mail me directly.

Credits

Slushomatic uses several open-source tools - iText for generation of PDF files by Bruce Lowagie and Paulo Soares (http://www.lowagie.com/iText/), Apache Xerces (www.apache.org) for reading and writing the XML files, and l4j (http://launch4j.sourceforge.net/docs.html) for creating the exe file for the jar-impaired.