Ask HN: How to create textbook-like PDFs?

5 points·mknits··6 comments

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)?

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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

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

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.

The docbook tool chain is a nightmare to setup though.

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/).

Http://PressBooks.com

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