Readability on cellphone screens is really difficult, demanding a lot of compromise, and I'm very happy with what I was able to achieve there. The PDF renderer is at but probably it would have been a better use of time to figure out how to do it in pandoc, which has an actual box model, even though Petersen isn't enthusiastic about his experience with it. And Reportlab, a PDF output lib for Python 2, is just a pleasure to work with, which is a phrase very rarely found near the word “PDF”. Not great, but not bad for a 3700-page book. And page numbers make it possible to follow links in Google Drive’s inept PDF viewer, which otherwise lacks any such ability and is disappointingly the Android default, with about 15 seconds of focused effort. lmtlc made it possible to produce a PDF that can display 80 columns of fixed-pitch text on a cellphone screen at a readable size, although I had to fall back to FreeMono for characters outside lmtlc’s repertoire and for boldface. If I hadn't done such a rush job on the HTML renderer, I think it would have come out pretty well.Ī couple of aspects that did work well were Latin Modern Mono Condensed Light (lmtlc), a TeX font derived from Computer Modern Teletype, page-number links, and Reportlab. Maybe others will benefit from my experience.įor Dercuano I mostly just used Markdown (in Emacs and occasionally Vim, with Git) but then at the end I wrote a janky HTML renderer that outputs PDF in order to have a format people can read on cellphones. Similar to the author of the OP, I also like PDF better than other formats for reading ebooks. Supported output formats are: EPUB, Web Help, PDF, RTF, WML, DOCX (MS-Word) and ODT (OpenOffice/LibreOffice)." The last resource is what I will actually try : "XMLmind Ebook Compiler (ebookc for short) is a free, open source tool which can turn a set of HTML pages into a self-contained ebook. Looks pretty cool if I was generating documentation for a software product. Mallard seems inspired by DITA but more minimalist. DITA is geared towards creating manuals, but got me thinking it would be a useful way of splitting content for books and even blog posts. I find the concept of DITA very interesting: to write reusable chunks of content (called "Topics"), that one can later map into chapters and sections to generate a whole manual. In the process, I found a number of technologies I did not know before: I recently explored a bit the (seemingly never ending!) landscape of ways to create ebooks.
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