PDL Book as epub?

[cavac]

I was looking into learning PDL. I see there's the PDL Book linked on the official site, but unfortunately it's in PDF format. I can work with that, but an epub format for my ePaper reader would be preferable. The PDF has awfully small print, at least for my old, worn-out eyes. Yes, i could zoom the PDF, which makes for a suboptimal reading experience, so i'd prefer a format that i can reflow with bigger fonts.

Any chance something like this exists?

[LanX]

I was fiddling with ePUB recently, and it's basically glorified HTML in a zipped directory structure.

The book you mentioned seems to be that one downloadable for free here https://pdl.perl.org/content/pdl-book-toc.html (and I doubt that the fonts are inaccessible)

So you could go and try a PDF to HTML converter and build your own ePUB.

There are even free online services for PDF to ePUB, can't comment on the quality.

I suppose you'll have to adjust some parameters afterwards but I'm confident you have the necessary skills ;)

HTH

[LanX]

I realized that the link I gave is not the newest version, and while investigating I got the impression that the book was created from a POD source.

Then I stumbled over this

https://sourceforge.net/p/pdl/pdl-book/ci/master/tree/

Please note the included scripts to build a PDF and even an all in one HTML.

See also the sub directories with a POD file per chapter.

Starting from there it should be easy to write a script to build ePUB from POD. You may even contribute it to the project.

Disclaimer: no guarantee whatsoever for the actuality of the links given. I'm not part of this community and I find the repository structure kind of confusing.

Update

Maybe also of interest App::Pod2Epub

[cavac]

Thanks!

To be honest, yes i can make something work I was just hoping that someone already did and i was just looking at an old repository instead of the current one or something.

I already tried a couple of online converters. And the result is crap, to put it mildly.

Disclaimer: I can neither confirm nor deny that i, as a webdev, have the required skills to fiddle with HTML ;-)

[LanX]

See Re^2: PDL Book as epub? (POD source).

You can even adjust the make_book.pl script to use a larger font in PDF

> I was just hoping that someone already did

I know that feeling, especially after waking up and seeing the pile of dishes in the kitchen... (Again!)

[etj]

I've never actually used ePub or one of those new-fangled Kindle etc thingies. Could you try the PDL website's copy (as of a few minutes ago) of the entire book as a large web page, and see if that is a sufficient solution to your problem?

Otherwise, I'll be extremely grateful if you can have a go with the pod2latex etc stuff suggested elsewhere here and put somewhere here the commands to make such an ePub, and I'll be pleased to generate it and link on the website also.

[etj]

Warning: the specific link you give there is now gone, because the whole book is now a single web page on the site.

[haj]

Not directly answering the question, but I consider this relevant for learning PDL: I found the shell pdl2 incredibly useful. PDL is a bit special because it imports lot of stuff into your namespace, but for interactive use this is exactly what you want. The demo command of this shell is amazing. I use pdl2 a lot to check whether I understood the docs correctly. Also, it is very easy to visualize data sets by drawing them interactively in 2D and 3D.

[etj]

I've never really got into using the pdl2 shell; I find perldl works great for me.

The PDL website at https://pdl.perl.org/ had the first chapter (only) of The Book linked from the left sidebar. Had, you say? Yes. Now the same link is to the entire thing in one (somewhat large) web page. Comments welcome.

[karlgoethebier]

When it’s POD you could probably use pod2latex and pandoc to build the epub.

[LanX]

> pod2latex

Latex is excellent for typesetting and PDF.

But in this case I'd rather go for one of the "Lightweight markup formats" supported by Pandoc -> https://pandoc.org/

See also https://pod-pandoc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Pod-Pandoc.html

But still anything involving pod2html is for me the way of minimum loss to go for, because the POD in question was designed to create HTML in the first place. And ePUB is mostly HTML

And there is even a cpan project for this App::Pod2Epub

[karlgoethebier]

pod2latex foo.pod && pandoc -f latex -t epub -o foo.epub foo.tex

No need to touch the LaTeX code.

[perlfan]

Calibre is a full, local e-book management system that can convert from PDF to various mobile formats to get it on your Kindle or whatever. YMMV.