EPUB Tsumego Template

The project reference example is .

Ever since I was able to download GoBooks' EPUB books, I am in love with digital Go books. It's just so much more practical and speedier to read in that format, specially due to the infinite scrolling, that I wish all my books were EPUBs now.

Do note this is different from a PDF. PDFs were made to be printed, it's the printable document format after all, they were actually not made to be read on a screen. EPUBs, on the other hand, offer basically everything you wish were available when using a digital screen or device, such as changing fonts, font size, spacing, alignment.

Sometimes, EPUBs might seem ugly, but that's usually due to the reader software, not the ebook itself. Elegant, aesthetically pleasing readers are not that trivial to find unfortunately, but here are three I find pretty and good enough, and which do read Go diagrams correctly:

• Thorium
• Lithium
• (i)Books

Writing Go ebooks, unless as PDFs — which you can reference in — eluded me for quite while, because I just had no idea how to create one. But, luckily, after accidentally mentioning my ignorance in this realm in an email to Anders Kierulf himself — founder of GoBooks and many other Go-related ventures and artifacts, such as the SGF format —, he mentioned they were simply HTML files, sometimes packed with CSS and JS as well, which makes total sense.

Then another lightbulb moment came to me, and I realized they could be written in a very simple way using two other tools:

• Pandoc
• GoWrite2

With Pandoc, the Go writer is able to create the ebook in Markdown, which greatly reduces the clutter and complexity in writing; and, with GoWrite2, the diagrams can be created as vector images, which do not suffer from pixelation. Also, with slightly different editing, Pandoc is also able to create a PDF version of the ebook.

GoBooks' EPUBs are still superior though, in my opinion. That's simply because their diagrams are much more interactive and suitably designed for EPUBs than the static vector diagrams GoWrite2 exports. However, I believe that isn't as big an issue if we are able to get the job done with as simple as stack as with Pandoc + GoWrite2.

So, with these tools, we're all set! Check out as reference! I've even included some reference EPUB programming books there if you would like to study the topic more.