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Comment by neves | Hacker News Reader

PDF is terrible to read in a Kindle. This book would be much more valuable in a ebook format.

Every time I tried to generate mobi files from Tex they were terrible formatted. O'Reilly does it fine with some open source books, but I've never managed to do it myself. Are the good publishing tools for ebooks just avaiable for specialized publishers?

Which techniques do you have to convert these Tex books to mobi (the Kindle format)?

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Pandoc[1] should do it for you. Running this -- from the root of the cloned project -- produced decent output for me:

  pandoc \
  	book.tex \
  	chapters/basic-datatypes.tex \
  	chapters/classes.tex \
  	chapters/dictionaries.tex \
  	chapters/functions.tex \
  	chapters/installation.tex \
  	chapters/introduction.tex \
  	chapters/loops.tex \
  	-o full-speed-python.epub

(you may replace .epub with .mobi to get that file format, but it seems to not support TeX math properly)

[1]: https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html

If enough people are interested, i may try to do something with pandoc to generate an ebook!

I would be interested

Would be interested if the focus is on Python 3.

Yes, the focus is on Python 3, definitely..

Me too

Epub and mobi formats would be great

I will check if i can produce an epub easily! Thanks for all sugestions..

I would also be interested. LeanPub might also be a good shout.

Definitely, the problem with leanpub is that they ask for 99$ to start a book. I thought about that before, but i don't know if i could sell enough books to recover at least that inital value..

Definitely.

Yes. Me too

I am :)

I've included a pandoc generated epub at https://github.com/joaoventura/full-speed-python/releases/

I've had mixed results using Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/).

In all, I've converted 3 PDFs to Kindle format -- one is OK, one is a slog to read, and the third I forgot I was reading a converted version. Have never tried using it to convert a LaTeX-generated document of my own, though.

Since we already have the original TeX files, any conversion directly from PDF would be of lower quality.

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