New eBook format

[jayair]

We've got some great news for our Serverless Stack eBook readers. Serverless Stack is now available in a brand new eBook friendly format. Both as a PDF and EPUB version.

A huge thanks to @pepas24 and @fwang for putting this together in PR #327.

You all should've received the new version via email. If not, then make sure you are subscribed to the Serverless Stack newsletter and we'll send it to you.

Have a look and let us know if you find any problems.

Thanks!

[mattwelke]

Glad to see this in PDF format. I like to save PDFs to my phone and tablet for reading in places where I have no internet connection.

I found an issue copy and pasting code. It copies to the clip board as a bunch of weird characters:

When I'm reading at the computer, following along, copying code, this would interrupt my flow.

[jayair]

LOL wow that's complete gibberish. Which PDF reader are you using?

[LosD]

@jayair This looks maybe like another symptom of what I found: I can't search the PDF. In Chrome, Driver PDF Viewer, OneDrive PDF Viewer and Dropbox PDF Viewer, searches gets weird. E.g. searching for "gr" yields results with "do". In Acrobat Reader for Android, nothing is found, even searching for single letters.

And it's rather huge. 203 MB. Yes, it's a large document, but most images should be easily compressible. Could the text have been replaced with raster images or something?

[jayair]

It's weird because the search and copy paste works in the Mac Preview app. Though the indents are not copied over.

[jayair]

The mystery deepens, I think something went wrong with this specific version. The older ones that were generated don't have this issue.

@LosD Can you try downloading the PDF from here — https://github.com/AnomalyInnovations/serverless-stack-com/actions/runs/321103427 and doing the search?

[LosD]

@jayair Both search and copying works! 😄

Copying still loses indents, though, but I guess 99/100 uses an IDE capable of auto indenting, so that's quite minor 🙂

It's still large-ish at 150MB, but that's also a minor thing. Just a bit weird (maybe just images without compression?)

[jayair]

That's good. We'll push a new version with this shortly.

Yeah I haven't looked the images issue yet. Anybody with Pandoc experience want to help us out here?

[LosD]

Looking at it again, it might not be that weird. There's more images than I remember, and it IS almost 1000 pages. And the images are rather high resolution, which I guess they should be to look good when printed.

[mattwelke]

Which PDF reader are you using?

This was the PDF reader built into Chrome on Windows 10. Usually on my PCs, I'll use Adobe Reader and on my tablet, I'll use Readera. Haven't tried those yet.

Tested the new build. Used Adobe Reader. It worked well. :)

[jayair]

Great! Thanks guys. We'll push out a new version. And email it out early next week. Don't want to flood people's inboxes.