After twelve releases and over 140,000 downloads of my explanatory document “http2 explained“, I eventually did the right thing and converted the entire book over to markdown syntax and put the book up on gitbook.com.
Better output formats, now epub, MOBI, PDF and everything happens on every commit.
Better collaboration, github and regular pull requests work fine with text content instead of weird binary word processor file formats.
Easier for translators. With plain text commits to aid in tracking changes, and with the images in a separate directory etc writing and maintaining translated versions of the book should be less tedious.
I’m amazed and thrilled that we already have Chinese, Russian, French and Spanish translations and I hear news about additional languages in the pipe.
I haven’t yet decided how to do with “releases” now, as now we update everything on every push so the latest version is always available to read. Go to http://daniel.haxx.se/http2/ to find out the latest about the document and the most updated version of the document.
Thanks everyone who helps out. You’re the best!
Great, Daniel.
Gitbook has a serious issue though: font size (at least by default) in resulting PDF files is too small to read comfortably even in full-screen mode on a typical screen (e.g. 24″ 16:9):
it is 25-30% smaller by height resulting in that each letter is effectively about 2x (!) smaller in terms of area than, e.g., in O’Reilly books, and making it very hard to read, so user is forced to zoom in, but then reading gets unusable due to need for constant vertical scrolling to reveal different parts of page.
A serif font family (as opposed to sans-serif) would probably also be more suitable for books.
MT: thanks for the feedback, and comparing with the former version I too can see that the new font is much smaller than the previously used one.
I’ll see what I can do about it… Ah look, there’s a CSS that’s specific for the generated PDF that I am supposed to be able to change this for so I’ll get to work!
Update: now the PDF uses a much larger font. Possibly too large =)
Great, Daniel. Font size is now totally fine, and text is easy to read. Thanks.