Look into publishing PDFs with mdbook-typst

[mgeisler]

There is a new tool which can convert an mdbook to Typst format, and thus also to high-quality PDFs: https://github.com/LegNeato/mdbook-typst

[LegNeato]

This exposed some bugs in my libraries, thanks! Attached is a generated PDF with the unreleased changes. Obviously there is more work to do, and I haven't yet styled on the typst side so presentation is lacking.

book.pdf

The TOC and headings and stuff are a bit wonky as I tuned the heuristics on the mdBook guide. That area is pretty hacky and I am going to be beefing it up in the coming weeks so it works for most / all cases.

There are escape hatches that let you directly insert typst markup before and after mdbook-typst does its thing. That is a potential stop gap solution if you can't find time to contribute improvements directly yet still want to tweak the output.

[simonsan]

That looks awesome already! Much better than the normal pdf print output! That's great!

[mgeisler]

Yeah, wow, thank you for producing this!

People have asked for a PDF version once or twice — I suggest we publish this when we publish the course and replace the print page with a link directly to the PDF.

[max-heller]

Sorry to hijack this thread, but it seems to be gaining traction. I recently released a similar tool, mdbook-pandoc, that can generate PDFs (and other formats) using pandoc. It doesn't have the potential to be 100% Rust that mdbook-typst has, but seems more mature at the moment. Here's a PDF of the book generated with the following config:

[output.pandoc.profile.pdf]
output = "Comprehensive Rust.pdf"
pdf-engine = "lualatex"

Two notes on generating the book

• I had to comment out the badges in src/index.md since pandoc doesn't know what to do with them--it usually handles remote images well, but I think the non-image extensions (e.g. .yml are confusing it):

  diff --git a/src/index.md b/src/index.md
  index bcff48c..d35360d 100644
  --- a/src/index.md
  +++ b/src/index.md
  @@ -1,8 +1,10 @@
   # Welcome to Comprehensive Rust 🦀
  
  +<!--
   [![Build workflow](https://img.shields.io/github/actions/workflow/status/google/comprehensive-rust/build.yml?style=flat-square)](https://github.com/google/comprehensive-rust/actions/workflows/build.yml?query=branch%3Amain)
   [![GitHub contributors](https://img.shields.io/github/contributors/google/comprehensive-rust?style=flat-square)](https://github.com/google/comprehensive-rust/graphs/contributors)
   [![GitHub stars](https://img.shields.io/github/stars/google/comprehensive-rust?style=flat-square)](https://github.com/google/comprehensive-rust/stargazers)
  +-->
  
   This is a free Rust course developed by the Android team at Google. The course covers
   the full spectrum of Rust, from basic syntax to advanced topics like generics

• The book contains unicode characters that the default LaTeX font doesn't support (e.g. 🦀), so you may want to swap out the fonts.

[LegNeato]

Awesome, that looks great!

[mgeisler]

Thanks for posting this @max-heller! Seeing the course in this form makes me nostalgic for my old university days!

I don't have a lot of bandwidth to experiment with this right now, but I would be supportive of us publishing a PDF along with the HTML. It's probably just a matter of adding a few lines to our publish.yml file.

[simonsan]

I don't have a lot of bandwidth to experiment with this right now, but I would be supportive of us publishing a PDF along with the HTML. It's probably just a matter of adding a few lines to our publish.yml file.

Shouldn't it be able to be built into the /book directory and then linked in the html template instead of the browser print dialogue if that value is set in the book.toml? At least this would be what I would expect from a rendered pdf.

Unfortunately that is less mobile compatible: https://caniuse.com/?search=pdf as fewer browsers seems to have a built-in pdf viewer. :/

The alternative could be to introduce another link on the top menu right-hand side for opening it as a pdf-book, or an Export dropdown where different rendered books are mentioned. pdf and epub for example.

[mgeisler]

I don't have a lot of bandwidth to experiment with this right now, but I would be supportive of us publishing a PDF along with the HTML. It's probably just a matter of adding a few lines to our publish.yml file.

Shouldn't it be able to be built into the /book directory and then linked in the html template instead of the browser print dialogue if that value is set in the book.toml? At least this would be what I would expect from a rendered pdf.

Right, I think I agree: we can remove the 🖨️ button from the pages and instead link to the PDF.

Unfortunately that is less mobile compatible: https://caniuse.com/?search=pdf as fewer browsers seems to have a built-in pdf viewer. :/

If the print.html page is no longer generated, then I suppose people lose a way of easily getting a concatenated version of the HTML for the course. A PDF would be a concatenated version, but it would of course look different.

I don't think much is lost if we don't link to print.html and replace it with a well-formatted PDF.

The alternative could be to introduce another link on the top menu right-hand side for opening it as a pdf-book, or an Export dropdown where different rendered books are mentioned. pdf and epub for example.

I would prefer to add a new page in the course which links to the PDF (and perhaps other formats if we generate those). Horizontal space is a costly resource, so this would allow us to remove the 🖨️ icon on every page.