LaTeX Output

mkbook can also export a LaTeX file which can be used to convert your book to a beatiful, ready-to-print PDF. This feature is still under heavy development as it’s not quite as smooth as I would like, and the generated .tex document is perhaps a bit too customized—I’m still exploring this.

For now, however, you can convert your book into a single .tex file with the following command which will create the file ./print/book.tex along with any images needed to render the book:

mkbook build -l ./print/book.tex

Note that this command is more about preparing a .tex file that you can then further customize for your own book than having a complete, ready-to-go PDF that is entirely your own—the current LaTeX template that gets generated works for me but it may not work for you.

Images

If an image in the document is an external image (i.e. it starts with http:// or https://), mkbook will attempt to download the image the same directory that the generated LaTeX document resides in. If it cannot do so, it will tell you. If, on the other hand, the image is in the source tree, it will be copied over the same way that any other asset is and should be available to the LaTeX file.

Similar to this, mkbook will attempt to render any plantuml code sections into .svg files which also get included in the book.

Building the Book

The current LaTeX template requires the following packages to be installed:

• ulem
• fontspec
• sectsty
• xcolor
• minted
• amsmath
• amssymb
• enumitem
• textcomp
• graphicx
• float
• svg
• menukeys

The template also requires XeTeX and the following fonts to be available on your system:

• Crimson
• Poppins
• Source Code Pro

Finally, in order to color the source code, you must have Pygments installed and the pygmentize executable must be available on your path.

If you meet all these requirements, you can build the book using xelatex (better yet, use latexmk). Assuming you built the book.tex file in the print directory as above:

cd print
latexmk -xelatex -shell-escape book.tex

Note that the -shell-escape argument is required in order to get Pygments to colour your source code, and the xelatex command is run twice in order to properly build the table of contents.

Note also that in the current template, the pages that are created are 5.5 inches by 8 inches. This is to facilitate booklet printing on North American letter paper. Feel free to change this in the generated book.tex file before compiling if you need to.

Compiling a Booklet

If you want to easily print this book as a booklet, you can take one more step to arrange the pages so that a simple duplex print on any printer will produce signatures that you can easily bind yourself (there are many tutorials online for doing this, I recommend Easy paperback book binding how-to by Rubén Berenguel).

The first step is to create a file alongside your compiled book.pdf file called printbook.tex with the contents as such:

\documentclass[letterpaper]{article}
\usepackage[final]{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
\includepdf[pages=-,nup=1x2,landscape,signature=32]{book.pdf}
\end{document}

You can change the value of signature as you like, but keep it a multiple of 4. The signature is the number of pages (not sheets of paper) which get combined into a “mini-booklet”, and the final book is a combination of all of the signatures (“mini-booklets”) to make the full book. Essentially, if you divide this number by 4, you’ll get the number of sheets of paper that you’ll have to staple together at a time. For a signature of 32 pages, this will mean stapling together 8 pages at a time.

Note that if you have a relatively short book, it may be advantageous to just do all of the book’s pages into one signature, in this case make the signature the next multiple-of-four value higher than the total number of sheets in the book.pdf file. For example: if book.pdf contains 45 pages, make signature=48 to put everything into a single signature.

Finally, compile printbook.tex using pdflatex:

pdflatex printbook.tex

As a sample, you can view the compiled book and printbook files for this book to see how this can turn out.