A few months ago I looked at the PDFs produced by ebookmaker and wondered
if it would be possible to create a utility that made a PDF good enough to
use as interior pages for a print-on-demand book. I have been experimenting
with rst2pdf (the utility program that ebookmaker's PDF generation is based
on) and I've published a bunch of trade paperback books on Kindle Direct
Publishing that started out as my RST donations to Project Gutenberg. The
first picture shows proof copies from all the books I've published with
this method. The second picture shows just how nice the interior pages
look. Pictures can float inside paragraphs and alongside paragraphs, math
formulas and fractions are formatted beautifully, and words are hyphenated
automatically.
I did cover images with The GIMP using either pictures from the book itself
or other art in the public domain. I used free fonts and sometimes made
them fancier by adding drop shadows and distortion effects in The GIMP.
Converting an RST file to a nicely formatted TEX file can be done in one or
two afternoons. The TEX file produced by rst2pdf needs to be touched up
with a text editor, but this is surprisingly little work.
If you don't have an RST file a plain text file from PG can be turned into
an RST file with very little work. That is what I did with *Ancient
Manners,*
James Simmons
