3 ms·

Great resource, though I wish it was available as an EPUB (or MOBI, or AZW3).

sharmi 8y ago
I use moon reader pro on Android. It allows annotating and highlighting pdf text. I am not affiliated except as a long time user.
qazpot 8y ago
Why wish, when you can convert PDFs to EPUB very easily using online converters.
- znpy 8y ago
  Yes, but the resulting documents often are horrendous when rendered on ereaders and similar.
- piyush_soni 8y ago
  Yeah i tried doing that. The conversion is so bad with multiple random line breaks in a single line, and some unicode characters not getting converted etc. It was a bad experience.
rezeroed 8y ago
It is. Follow the internet archive link.
- webmaven 8y ago
  An automatic conversion to EPUB from PDF or from a scan is not what I was asking for.
jefferickson 8y ago
You can get an EPUB and MOBI versions from the Internet Archive (auto-converted from my uploaded pdf), but I can't vouch for its quality. All the fonts are baked into the PDF, so it should be readable anywhere; if it isn't, please submit a bug report! But if you're looking for a format that lets you reflow the text, by changing the margins or font or text size, you're out of luck. The only way to write something like that is to bake it in from the beginning. That's easy for pure text, but hard to impossible for technical documents with lots of displayed equations, big hard-formatted boxes of text (ie, algorithms), and the like. (Boaz Barak managed it by writing his Modern Complexity Theory book entirely in Markdown. The mind boggles.)
- atombender 8y ago
  I don't know what you use to typeset the book, as I can't find any source files, but isn't LaTeX really good at this? I'm not sure what makes it hard to reflow. The text seems to be mostly paragraphs with figures, inline formulas and footnotes; pretty basic stuff, no? (O'Reilly's books were famously typeset with Troff/Groff for many years, though I don't know how painful that was or how advanced their typesetting needs were.) All I know is that I'd love a version that worked on smaller devices. I tried the Kindle version reformatted by archive.org, but it has lost most of the formatting, making it almost completely unreadable. I'd especially like an HTML version of the book that was fully hyperlinked, with zoomable vector figures, footnotes hidden away in popups, etc.
  - webmaven 8y ago
    > (O'Reilly's books were famously typeset with Troff/Groff for many years, though I don't know how painful that was or how advanced their typesetting needs were.) I beleive that O'Reilly Media has used ASCIIDoc[0] as their preferred internal format for quite a few years. Formulas are supported through ASCIIMthML[1]. More recently, they seem to have transitioned to HTMLBook[2] as a preferred source format for systems like Atlas[3]. [0] ASCIIDoc is basically a Markdown-like (or ReStructuredText-like) format that is feature-equivalent to DocBook XML: http://asciidoc.org/ http://asciidoc.org/ [1] http://asciidoc.org/asciimathml.html http://asciidoc.org/asciimathml.html [2] http://oreillymedia.github.io/HTMLBook/ http://oreillymedia.github.io/HTMLBook/ [3] https://atlas.oreilly.com/ https://atlas.oreilly.com/
- webmaven 8y ago
  > I can't vouch for its quality The quality of the EPUB is terrible, it looks like it was OCR'd from images of the pages, not just converted from PDF. Can you make the source format for the book available?

I use moon reader pro on Android. It allows annotating and highlighting pdf text. I am not affiliated except as a long time user.

qazpot 8y ago

Why wish, when you can convert PDFs to EPUB very easily using online converters.

znpy 8y ago
Yes, but the resulting documents often are horrendous when rendered on ereaders and similar.
piyush_soni 8y ago
Yeah i tried doing that. The conversion is so bad with multiple random line breaks in a single line, and some unicode characters not getting converted etc. It was a bad experience.

rezeroed 8y ago

It is. Follow the internet archive link.

webmaven 8y ago
An automatic conversion to EPUB from PDF or from a scan is not what I was asking for.

jefferickson 8y ago

You can get an EPUB and MOBI versions from the Internet Archive (auto-converted from my uploaded pdf), but I can't vouch for its quality. All the fonts are baked into the PDF, so it should be readable anywhere; if it isn't, please submit a bug report! But if you're looking for a format that lets you reflow the text, by changing the margins or font or text size, you're out of luck. The only way to write something like that is to bake it in from the beginning. That's easy for pure text, but hard to impossible for technical documents with lots of displayed equations, big hard-formatted boxes of text (ie, algorithms), and the like. (Boaz Barak managed it by writing his Modern Complexity Theory book entirely in Markdown. The mind boggles.)

atombender 8y ago
I don't know what you use to typeset the book, as I can't find any source files, but isn't LaTeX really good at this? I'm not sure what makes it hard to reflow. The text seems to be mostly paragraphs with figures, inline formulas and footnotes; pretty basic stuff, no? (O'Reilly's books were famously typeset with Troff/Groff for many years, though I don't know how painful that was or how advanced their typesetting needs were.) All I know is that I'd love a version that worked on smaller devices. I tried the Kindle version reformatted by archive.org, but it has lost most of the formatting, making it almost completely unreadable. I'd especially like an HTML version of the book that was fully hyperlinked, with zoomable vector figures, footnotes hidden away in popups, etc.
- webmaven 8y ago
  > (O'Reilly's books were famously typeset with Troff/Groff for many years, though I don't know how painful that was or how advanced their typesetting needs were.) I beleive that O'Reilly Media has used ASCIIDoc[0] as their preferred internal format for quite a few years. Formulas are supported through ASCIIMthML[1]. More recently, they seem to have transitioned to HTMLBook[2] as a preferred source format for systems like Atlas[3]. [0] ASCIIDoc is basically a Markdown-like (or ReStructuredText-like) format that is feature-equivalent to DocBook XML: http://asciidoc.org/ http://asciidoc.org/ [1] http://asciidoc.org/asciimathml.html http://asciidoc.org/asciimathml.html [2] http://oreillymedia.github.io/HTMLBook/ http://oreillymedia.github.io/HTMLBook/ [3] https://atlas.oreilly.com/ https://atlas.oreilly.com/
webmaven 8y ago
> I can't vouch for its quality The quality of the EPUB is terrible, it looks like it was OCR'd from images of the pages, not just converted from PDF. Can you make the source format for the book available?