NASA Transcript Printer

Legacy-Layout Apollo Transcript Reprinting Engine

Python pipeline to reconstruct high-quality Apollo transcript PDFs from structured JSON.

About

This repository is the legacy-layout print engine of the Apollo transcript effort.

I started this work to make mission transcripts easier to preserve, read, and share in a modern format, while staying as faithful as possible to the original NASA pages. The long-term objective is to reprint transcripts for all Apollo missions with mission-aware rules, not one-off manual tweaks.

This project consumes structured JSON generated upstream by: https://github.com/JeanLouisParent/Nasa-Transcript-Processor

In short:

• Nasa-Transcript-Processor builds and normalizes the transcript data.
• nasa_transcript_printer rebuilds print-ready PDFs from that data.

Visual Comparison

Example on a noisy/rough source page (Apollo 11, original page 56):

Goals

• Reproduce the historical transcript layout (columns, headers, annotations, metadata).
• Provide a clear, packageable CLI.
• Keep a maintainable base: clear package layout, quality tooling, and documentation.

Project Structure

.
├── input/                    # source files (JSON, TXT, PDF)
├── output/                   # generated PDFs
├── config/
│   ├── common.toml           # shared defaults across missions
│   └── missions/
│       ├── _template.toml    # template for new missions
│       └── apollo11.toml     # mission-specific overrides
├── docs/
│   ├── ARCHITECTURE.md
│   └── CLI.md
├── src/
│   ├── cli.py
│   ├── config.py
│   ├── constants.py
│   ├── io_utils.py
│   ├── layout.py
│   └── renderer.py
├── pyproject.toml
└── LICENSE

Installation

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .[dev]

Quick Usage

python src/cli.py \
  --common-config config/common.toml \
  --mission-config config/missions/apollo11.toml \
  --pdf-pages 3-12

Add a new mission by copying config/missions/_template.toml to config/missions/<mission>.toml, then run with --mission-config. Mission configs can include special_pages lists for page-specific layouts.

Render the full Apollo 11 transcript with defaults:

python src/cli.py \
  --common-config config/common.toml \
  --mission-config config/missions/apollo11.toml \
  --start-page 1 \
  --out output/AS11_TEC_full.pdf

Quality Checks

python -m ruff check .
python -m mypy src

Notes

• Default shared font is Prestige (~/Library/Fonts/prestige.ttf).
• Fallback order is Courier Prime, then built-in Courier if no TTF is found.
• If --json is a filename only, the CLI automatically looks in input/.
• If --out is a filename only, output is automatically written to output/.
• Default reference DPI is 1200 (configurable in config/common.toml).
• Mission-specific rendering rules are configurable per mission TOML.