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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

I've written a few short-ebook-like technical posts and it still surprises me the number of people who ask for when the PDF format is coming... I get that not everyone can have access to a web browser at every occasion they have for reading...but the web provides a much better canvas for illustrating technical concepts, especially with the ability to create interactive bits with JS. Save the couch reading for leisure/non-technical reading, and read technical pieces when you're on the computer (and have ready access to Google/StackOverflow).

On a selfish note, writing HTML seems to be much easier than producing a properly formatted PDF page. So I enjoy technical writing, but not enough to go through the hoops of for-paper (or paper like e-books) publishing.

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I was actually thinking about this earlier. Why is pdf so hard to deal with? And why is around in the first place? I can imagine a future where html5/js combo is enough to convert a set of html pages to a nice offline-supported readable format.

With that said, I usually just go to the print page of some links and read. You will be surprised how many sites inadvertently give the best reading experience through their printer page (NYT for example)

I don't know if it's hard as I've never tried. But as I've tried a lot of ways to print websites as PDFs, through various third-party services, I'm assuming it's not at all straightforward...

I think the "hard" part is properly paginating things? And I guess generating table of contents, inner-book-links, things that my blogging platform (Octopress) handles in a way that I've been used to as a Rails templater.

We can import blogs and generate ebooks (PDF, EPUB and MOBI) at Leanpub. The idea is that you should self-publish as you write, and that starting with a blog is a great way to start. We generate a table of contents, support crosslinks, etc. It may be what you want...

There are a number of things that don't quite transfer like headers and footers, keeping blocks together and of course paper doesn't have scroll bars.

> And why is around in the first place?

PDFs predate both CSS and the legion of webdevs we have available now. It's effectively vestigial.

However, PDFs do allow for digital signing, which is not a feature webpages can have AFAIK.

PDF exists because the format allows a UA to render any given page in a document without having to render the whole document. With PostScript you had to run the entire program to accurately know what would be on a particular page.

And why is around in the first place? I can imagine a future where html5/js combo is enough to convert a set of html pages to a nice offline-supported readable format.

Same deal with MP3 vs other formats. PDF is a sort of gold standard in being able to precisely lay out text and know it'll render mostly right on most devices (even if the format/layout is wrong for those devices).

HTML5 and EPUB are getting there but vary so much between different platforms that till now (and EPUB 3 is changing this) the quality of books in those formats has been hideous production wise. Compare the typical EPUB book against the typical PDF book in terms of whitespace, layout, fonts, and how the author and publisher intended it to look.

Did you give a try to wkhtmltopdf? http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/

What a fantastic tool. Thanks!

If you're interested in HTML->PDF without the hoop jumping have a look at princeXML. It's incredibly good.

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