Yesterday, I toyed around with the idea of turning my entire blog into a nicely-formatted book, in both PDF and epub format. This would probably interest no one but myself, but I’ve seen other people turn these online words into a feel-it-with-your-hands book, and to me, seeing something physical from the effort seems to add more weight to the work, but figuratively and literally.
I wanted Latex output, so I installed pandoc (which might be one of the most magical pieces of software I’ve ever used) and ran it across the Jekyll-created HTML. I then started the yak-shaving to clean up the headers and footers and download the remote linked images. The part I enjoyed most about using pandoc is that it automatically did a lot of the spell-casting that resulted in nicely-sized images that always gives me fits when dealing with Latex.
I then tried to work all these steps into an automated flow, but realized that beyond putting files in their appropriate places, I actually enjoyed the manual “typesetting” that Latex needs so I tried to stop engineering things for once.
Once I actually saw the some hundred-odd paged book, I had a few more ideas of things that might neat to see in print from the past year and thus don’t have anything to show yet for the book efforts, but I did want to just put up a sample of what one post looks like.
Here’s my Thanksgiving post from last week. There’s something odd about seeing what was originally web content in a more typographic form, and it will be even more odd seeing it in print (if it progresses that far).
I plan on documenting the whole process as I’d like to see other try this out.
nolan caudill's internet house 