Making eBooks with Docverter

18 June 2013

I've been writing my guide to integrating Stripe with Rails using markdown, as with most textual projects that I work on. Every chapter is a markdown-formatted file living in a git repo, sycned-on-save to my git server and S3 using SparkleShare. When I want to peek at the rendered version I use little previewer app running on a VM on my Mac mini that I talked about previously.

A good eBook needs a PDF version, of course. Awhile back I wrote an open-source service named Docverter that can render XHTML to PDF using a library named Flying Saucer, among other things. All you have to do is pipe in the HTML and other related files and you get back a rendered, self-contained PDF file. There are a few non-trivial aspects to this, of course, because HTML is not primarily intended for printable output. The W3C has worked up a whole CSS module for page-related styles but it's not the most readable document. There's a few simple-ish things that you can do to your document to make it look nice, though.

Tagged: Docverter 

Docverter is now Open Source

23 November 2012

A few months ago I created a hosted document conversion service named Docverter. The idea was to collect together the best document conversion tools I could find into one comprehensive service and sell access. Many of these tools are difficult to install if you're used to a service like Heroku, so it only made sense to wrap it all up.

Tagged: Docverter  Programming 

On-the-fly Markdown Conversion to PDF and Docx

20 October 2012

Today I added PDF, Docx, and Markdown download links to the bottom of every post here on Bugsplat. Scroll down to the bottom to see them, the scroll back up here to read how it works.

Tagged: Docverter  Programming  Meta