Strava Book

I created a book based on our shared Strava activities, as a gift to my partner.

The book is generated semi-automatically with the code in this repo. Beware, this is not production code, but hacky code that works on my machine instead. Feel free to use it as you wish as inspiration to generate your own books.

While this readme file is not a documentation, it explains most of what you need to know. The rest is left up to the reader :)

Description of the Files

1_download_activities.py - download all your Strava activities
2_cleanup_activities.py  - cleanup the activities
book.py                  - main file
config.py                - holds various parameters + API keys
geocoding.py             - calls geocoding API
json_utils.py            - manages JSON files
index_creator.py         - manages book index
map_maker.py             - calls static maps API
page_creator.py          - created a PDF out of an activity
elevation_chart.py       - draws the elevation chart
elevation.py             - gets elevations data out of polylines
icons/                   - various SVG icons used in the book
images/                  - various PNG images used in the book
polyline_decoder.py      - converts polyline into coordinates
pages/                   - one folder per page

pages/ACTIVITY_ID/
    _meta_.json          - hand-written activity metadata, useful for indexing and customizing contents
                        {
                            "Titre": "",
                            "Sommets": [],
                            "Cabanes": [],
                            "Region": "Bas Valais - Sud",
                            "Comments": "Test",
                            "Course": true,
                            "Trail": true,
                            "override_date": "1-2-3 janvier 2024"
                        }
    photos/         - either 1 or 4 photos, named 1.jpg, 2.jpg, etc

1. Download your activities

python3 1_download_activities.py

2. Cleanup Strava data

python3 2_cleanup_activities.py

3. Generate the book

Generating the book is an incremental process.

Essentially, book.py will parse activities_ids.json and build one page per list of activities.

book.py can be used with options, depending on what you want to achieve.

python3 book.py
    -s --sequential       Sequential (no parallelism)
    -t --use_test_data    Use a subset of activities (activities_ids_test.json)
    -i --index_only       Generate only index
    -c --cache_for_pages  Don't regenerate existing pages
    -o --open             Open result file (PDF)
    -p --page             Open activity for page
    -d --directory        Open directory

Pages directories are generated based on, either:

• a single activity id
• several merged activity ids
• a string, designating a directory with a full page photo

Sample activities_ids.json

    [
        [6706720434, 6706941227],       # activities to be merged
        [6726577929],                   # single activity
        [6735743335],                   # single activity
        [6740294797],                   # single activity
        ["mont_blanc"]                  # full page photo
    ]

You typically want to customize the pages by editing _meta_.json and photos/, and regenerate the pages when done.

I used MapTiler for mapping and geo-coding APIs and Stadia for the elevation API. API keys live in config.json.

4. PDF post-processing for print

gs -o book_print.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dEmbedAllFonts=true -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -dDownsampleColorImages=false -dDownsampleGrayImages=false -dDownsampleMonoImages=false -dColorImageResolution=300 -dGrayImageResolution=300 -dMonoImageResolution=1200 book.pdf

5. Upload the book and create the cover

See https://pdf-to-book.bookfactory.ch