Would love an PDF version

[holgern]

Thank you for your great work.
I find the webpages quite hard to read and I would love a PDF version.

Could I help in creating one? Do you have an idea in how to realize this?

I'm familiar with latex but I have no idea in how to sync the content between the jekyll sites and tex files.
Could pandoc be a solution?

[mflaxman]

I'm a fan of the idea, but IKD if there's an easy way to do that with jekyll. If there's an automated way that will stay in sync with each update, I'd like it.

There also may be a 3rd party tool that crawls your website and makes it into a PDF automatically, which has obvious security negatives but would be easy.

[holgern]

It seems there are a few options to explore: https://mattgilbertnet.github.io/colloidsorg/informatics/2014/08/03/markdown_latex_pdf.html

• Jekyll plugin from Markdown to PDF via Pandoc LaTeX
• Markdown to PDF without LaTeX
• Direct html5 to PDF conversion without LaTeX
• Kramdown: Markdown to LaTeX, some cleanup required

The kramdown way seems a possible way:

• convert each md file into a tex file with kramdown
• fix image paths
• remove YAML
• Read out the structure and apply it to the latex document (parse next_url)
• use input in latex to add the tex files into a latex document
• build a PDF from the latex source files

[holgern]

I decided to go for the pandoc + LaTeX solution:

• document toc needs to be processed
• pandoc can read the markdown files directly
• yaml header needs to be removed
• includes needs to be resolved
• image link path needs to be fixed
• Number of # needs to be adapted

After doing these steps by hand, a PDF could be created (there are some unresolved includes in the last chapter and some wrong headers)

@mflaxman What do you think? Should I proceed?
btcguide.pdf

[holgern]

I created a new branch: https://github.com/holgern/btcguide.github.io/tree/btcguide-pandoc

The changes on the markdown files can be checked here:
master...holgern:btcguide-pandoc

I decided to do the changed by hand, and with help of the compare function it will be easy to merge changes to the pandoc branch.

@mflaxman can you create a new branch and add my branch to your repo? Then PR for the pdf, ebook and mobi could be created and merged.

Adaption of the scripts for Linux and mac are still needed. At the moment they work only on windows. I think it will be easy to port them.

The created files can be found here:

• https://github.com/holgern/btcguide.github.io/blob/btcguide-pandoc/assets/btcguide.pdf
• https://github.com/holgern/btcguide.github.io/blob/btcguide-pandoc/assets/btcguide.epub
• https://github.com/holgern/btcguide.github.io/blob/btcguide-pandoc/assets/btcguide.mobi

I created also a release with these files:
https://github.com/holgern/btcguide.github.io/releases/tag/v0.2

[mflaxman]

Sorry for the delay, just digging into this now. Wow this is cool!

I want to separate content changes from feature (PDF/ebook) changes. If you can break it up into 2 PRs I can merge sequentially. Or if you'd rather I just grab from your branch I can do that (would steal your git cred)?

If it were any extra work I'd say that PDF gets you 99% of the way there, but since it doesn't seem to be harder supporting both is nice.

Does that make sense?

[holgern]

@mflaxman I found a way with LUA filters to generate a PDF and a EPUB file directly from the markdown files in _pages.
The only necessary changes are new lines before a list. I put these changes to a PR: #59
When you accept this PR, I will create a second one and add the lua filters and the pandoc script to create a pdf / epub.

[holgern]

The newest documents can be currently found here:
https://github.com/holgern/btcguide.github.io/releases/latest