Availability as common e-book formats

[StrScr]

Hello. I think this resource is great, but it is a bit inconvenient that to read it offline it is necessary to run a server. Could it be possible for you to offer it in some e-book format such as PDF or EPUB? It is not necessary, but some people, like myself, find it very convenient. Thank you for your time & effort.

[triska]

Hi Oscar,

yes, I will eventually offer this as a PDF. I will send you a note as soon as it becomes available.

Thank you for your feedback!
Markus

[kozross]

I too would like to hear when it becomes available for offline reading as a PDF or ebook of some other kind.

[triska]

Thank you very much for your interest! I will prominently announce the PDF of the book once it is available.

Until then, I would like to fill a few remaining gaps and establish a more solid basis. Currently, I am still making changes almost every week, and I would also like to incorporate more feedback until then.

[NJBS]

Hey, any update on this? It seems development has become somewhat more stable.

[triska]

Yes, there are good news regarding this issue: Some instructions to create such a file have generously been submitted as a pull request, please see #7 for more information.

Please let me know how they work for you, and if anything is missing. If possible, please file such comments directly in #7.

[medovina]

You can convert The Power of Prolog to a PDF using the command-line utility ebook-convert from Calibre. To do this, you first need to modify the top-level file prolog.html so that it contains actual relative links to the various subpages, so that ebook-convert can find them. For example, instead of

<li><a href="/prolog/introduction"><b>Introduction</b></a></li>

it needs to look like this:

<li><a href="introduction.html"><b>Introduction</b></a></li>

Once you've done that, you can convert from HTML to EPUB and then from EPUB to PDF. This worked well for me:

ebook-convert prolog.html prolog.epub --chapter-mark "none" --page-breaks-before "/" --flow-size 0  --level1-toc '//h:h1' --level2-toc '//h:h2'

ebook-convert prolog.epub prolog.pdf --chapter-mark "none" --pdf-page-margin-top 20 --pdf-page-margin-bottom 20

I also tried converting from HTML to PDF directly, but found that the generated PDF looks better if you go through EPUB as a separate step.

The generated PDF looks pretty good, but not all the embedded hyperlinks work. Again, that's because they don't appear as proper relative links in the source HTML pages. Markus, perhaps you'd like to update these links in the HTML source. (That would also make the site work better when using a Web browser to browse the site offline.)

By the way I also tried using Pandoc to perform this conversion, but I found that the result was far superior using ebook-convert.

[triska]

Thank you Adam for looking into this and for sharing these instructions!

I also greatly appreciate the interest from you all in in e-book version, and therefore I would like to add a general note to this discussion:

The videos will form an integral part of the book in the sense that many important features of Prolog can be most efficiently conveyed by sequences of editing operations, changes to queries, and animations of search processes. To illustrate this, I have now added a few of the videos I am currently working on, please see 3542ee4.

Here are a few links to some of the videos, for your enjoyment:

• https://www.metalevel.at/prolog/videos/metapredicates
• https://www.metalevel.at/prolog/videos/knights_and_knaves
• https://www.metalevel.at/prolog/videos/sudoku
• https://www.metalevel.at/prolog/videos/n_queens

The videos are always work in progress and may be replaced be newer versions at any time.

An important feature of the web-based setup is that it lets me flexibly redirect to the latest versions of these videos. Therefore, if possible, please use these stable links to refer to these videos. They will always point to the latest version.

I would like to revise some of these videos, and also add more, before I can comfortably provide an e-book version of the entire book.

Bonus videos:

• https://www.metalevel.at/prolog/videos/logic
• https://www.metalevel.at/prolog/videos/intro

Stay tuned!

[ryanpeach]

You can convert The Power of Prolog to a PDF using the command-line utility ebook-convert from Calibre. To do this, you first need to modify the top-level file prolog.html so that it contains actual relative links to the various subpages, so that ebook-convert can find them. For example, instead of

<li><a href="/prolog/introduction"><b>Introduction</b></a></li>

it needs to look like this:

<li><a href="introduction.html"><b>Introduction</b></a></li>

Once you've done that, you can convert from HTML to EPUB and then from EPUB to PDF. This worked well for me:

ebook-convert prolog.html prolog.epub --chapter-mark "none" --page-breaks-before "/" --flow-size 0  --level1-toc '//h:h1' --level2-toc '//h:h2'

ebook-convert prolog.epub prolog.pdf --chapter-mark "none" --pdf-page-margin-top 20 --pdf-page-margin-bottom 20

I also tried converting from HTML to PDF directly, but found that the generated PDF looks better if you go through EPUB as a separate step.

The generated PDF looks pretty good, but not all the embedded hyperlinks work. Again, that's because they don't appear as proper relative links in the source HTML pages. Markus, perhaps you'd like to update these links in the HTML source. (That would also make the site work better when using a Web browser to browse the site offline.)

By the way I also tried using Pandoc to perform this conversion, but I found that the result was far superior using ebook-convert.

Thanks @medovina

Since this hasn't been addressed yet, I followed your instructions and created https://github.com/ryanpeach/the-power-of-prolog-epub

Your instructions work well! Thanks. The epub is here

[ryanpeach]

@triska let me know if I am violating any license by providing the direct download on my fork. I'm not planning to maintain it, but given it's so easy to generate, I don't really understand why it's not just a part of the Github Actions on this repo for each release. I could write that for you if you'd like. Then the epub would stay always up to date with the html as you update it.