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"Professional" printed output from Wolfram Notebooks - How?

Posted 1 year ago

How do I actually publish with Wolfram Notebooks?

NOTA BENE: Any answer that doesn't involve Tex-/InDesign-quality PDF/PostScript output is a wrong answer. And I don't mean "this is technically TeX but is hideous" output, I mean "this will win design awards" output.

It can be done. I got excited before I started using WL when I saw in the frontmatter of Wolfram's "An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language", 2nd edition, that "Typesetting and page production were completed using Wolfram Notebooks". "That's amazing!", I thought. And then one of the very first times I Save-as-PDF of a notebook, the kerning of a Title-styled cell was massively broken. So much for that.

But that's not the only beautiful book that claims as much - so, too, Klopper's "Introduction to Statistics with the Wolfram Language", Bernard's "Introduction to Machine Learning", Dayton's "A Numerical Approach to Real Algebraic Curves with the Wolfram Language", etc. - in short, all of the titles emitted from Wolfram Media.

Now, just recently, Stephen mentioned in his keynote for the Wolfram Technology Conference 2022 that these tools for (self-)publishing are available and that he was ~surprised at the lack up uptake (if my memory serves me).

Really? I have looked and I have not found it.

Perhaps someone from the WRI staff can weigh in. Even better, perhaps someone from the WRI staff can point us (because I am surely not the only human using WL who would love this) at a .ZIP file that has all the tooling necessary for me to transform notebooks into beautiful printed documents without me having to roll my own Notebook-to-(PostScript | PDF | TeX) converter...

POSTED BY: Josh Helzer
3 Replies
Posted 1 year ago

In a follow-up discussion with Wolfram Media themselves, some clarifications (as of 2022-11-21) for posterity:

  1. The recommended way to emit PDFs is NotebookPrint (Save-as-PDF).
  2. There is currently no public way to automate the emission and assembly of the one-notebook-per-chapter inputs (as recommended by the WolframBookTools paclet) into a single PDF.
  3. Likewise there is no public automated way to generate tables of content.
  4. Likewise no public automated way to generated the "answers to exercises".
  5. Likewise no public automated way to generate indices.
  6. Likewise no public automated way to emit the sexy HTML/CSS/etc. as seen on Wolfram Blog posts.

In short, we must ourselves (currently) crawl that last mile. :/

POSTED BY: Updating Name
Posted 1 year ago

Ooooh...

Two points: 1. Wow, that was kind of just "sitting there" in retrospect (I never claimed I was good at finding things, haha). 2. This does indeed seem promising!

Thank you!

POSTED BY: Josh Helzer

I think using the book tools paclet. Never used it but seems a good place to start.

https://www.wolfram-media.com/resources.html

POSTED BY: Martijn Froeling
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