Ask HN: How to create textbook-like PDFs?

#1

Post by mknits » Fri, Aug 23, 2013, 3:44 AM UTC

Currently I'm reading one of the books available on http://inventwithpython.com/. How Al is able to produce such beautiful PDFs? What free and open-source software you can recommend (I use windows)?

Re: Ask HN: How to create textbook-like PDFs?

#2

Post by _pius » Fri, Aug 23, 2013, 4:02 AM UTC

I don't know what the author used, but the typical solution to this is LaTeX: http://www.latex-project.org/

Re: Ask HN: How to create textbook-like PDFs?

#3

Post by cabacon » Fri, Aug 23, 2013, 4:27 AM UTC

That reminds me of using Docbook to write the book, then using the various transformation engines to turn the docbook into PDF. I setup some docbook documentation that just used xsltproc to generate HTML and PDF from the same source. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2615002/how-to-generate-p... has some notes about the process.

For my part, I enjoyed the semantic markup it gave for something as big as a book, with auto-generating index and glossary as well. It's a lot of work, but the output reflects it. Looking at the HTML in the first chapter there, the spans with "term" and "menuitem" make me think something like docbook is going on behind this too.

Re: Ask HN: How to create textbook-like PDFs?

#4

Post by ada1981 » Fri, Aug 23, 2013, 5:36 AM UTC

Http://PressBooks.com

Re: Ask HN: How to create textbook-like PDFs?

#5

Post by ekr » Fri, Aug 23, 2013, 8:02 AM UTC

I've seen much more beautifully crafted books in Latex, compared to that.

Another (free-software) solution, embraced by people like Andrew Tanenbaum, is GNU Troff (http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/).

Re: Ask HN: How to create textbook-like PDFs?

#6

Post by tinyProton » Fri, Aug 23, 2013, 9:33 AM UTC

It's definitely LaTex. You can find some very nice LaTex templates in: http://www.latextemplates.com/. See this template for example: http://www.latextemplates.com/templates/books/2/book_2.pdf

Re: Ask HN: How to create textbook-like PDFs?

#7

Post by ig1 » Fri, Aug 23, 2013, 12:22 PM UTC

cabacon wrote: post #3

That reminds me of using Docbook to write the book, then using the various transformation engines to turn the docbook into PDF. I setup some docbook documentation that just used xsltproc to generate HTML and PDF from the same source. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2615002/how-to-generate-p... has some notes about the process. For my part, I enjoyed the semantic markup it gave for something as big as a book, with…

The docbook tool chain is a nightmare to setup though.