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Relsqui comments on Print ready version of The Sequences - Less Wrong
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Now you've got me wondering what it would take to make an ereader-ready file out of them.
The most important decision is the format. PDF support is pretty ubiquitous, but it's not reflowable (i.e. can't adapt to different screen sizes and user-adjusted fonts automatically), which looks bad on devices that have screens of different size than the size encoded in the PDF. Many devices implement some form of PDF reflow, which may work well for simple-layout PDFs (with no pullquotes or columns).
There's EPUB, a good reflowable open-source XML-based format, but it has its downsides too: not all ereaders support it, and, as I gather from the wikipedia page, the situation with linking is unclear -- which is important because the sequences are heavily interlinked.
There's also CHM (Windows help file format) which is both reflowable and linkable since it's based on HTML/CSS, but, as far as I know, few ereaders support it.
Based on my own experience, I strongly prefer EPUB. However I have no experience with its linking support.
I'd first try a linked EPUB and see how well its linking works on popular devices, or, as a second option, try a simple, sinlge-column, no-pullquotes PDF encoded for a 6-inch screen and see how well it reflows on various readers.
PDFs are pretty much write-only, and in my experience (with Adobe Acrobat-based devices) reflow never works very well. As long as you use a sane text-based ebook format, Calibre can handle conversion to other formats.
So I recommend converting into - if not EPUB, then maybe just a clean HTML (with all the links retained - readers that support HTML should have no problems with links between file sections).
Yes, some readers (e.g. Pocketbooks) can handle HTML, but even the latest Sony readers cannot. Kindle does have HTML support "via conversion" but I don't know if it can correctly convert 600 or so interlinked documents.
I was thinking more of a single, 600-chapter document.
(Actually this is why I think Sequences are best read on a computer, with multiple tabs open, like TVTropes or Wikipedia - not on an e-reader. I wonder how Eliezer's book will turn out...)
Thanks for the info!
I suppose for PDFs we could just have a list of various widths available.
Yes, but you'll still have to change the page size and recompile each of the 600 or so PDFs -- this is a huge amount of work if you're planning to do it manually. Generating PDFs for different screen sizes automatically (e.g. using a Python library) would be a better solution. I'm not familiar with PDF generation under Python, but I did a quick Google search and here's what I found:
http://www.devshed.com/c/a/Python/Python-for-PDF-Generation/
http://www.reportlab.com/software/opensource/
I've had success turning texts in various formats into EPUB files using Calibre.
ETA: Tried Calibre for making an ebook of the scrapings. Downloaded each sequence file, plus the index html, into the same directory. Modified index to point to local files instead of fully qualified URLs. Pointed Calibre at the index file, and it slurped the actual sequence files nicely. Resulting epub looks fine, corresponds to a 1300 page physical book and includes the inline images.
Made a script to do this.
Install the prerequisites:
apt-get install wget calibre tidy, or whatever works on your favorite OS.Then do
#!/bin/bash
TMPDIR=$(mktemp -d)
pushd $TMPDIR
wget -H -np -nd -k -p -r -l 1 http://pwnee.com/Sequences/list.html
tidy -m *.html
ebook-convert list.html lesswrong.epub
popd
cp $TMPDIR/lesswrong.epub .
Once you've harvested the text it would be straightforward to make a PDF, but I'm not sure how many ereaders support that format.
You can convert a pdf for kindle reading automatically, but the formatting winds up a bit spotty.
Me neither. Pretty sure the Kindle does but I'm not really familiar with the field, as I don't own one. (But I'd like to, which is why I was curious.)