Friday 11 March 2011

Open Babel book now available

The image above says it all. We've packaged up the Open Babel user documentation as a 160-page book and it's now available for purchase from Lulu at the cost price of €7.48 (since the postage may cost almost as much, you may want to consider buying Egon's and Angel's books at the same time).
Support independent publishing: Buy this book on Lulu.
This is the same documentation available from http://openbabel.org, but we've made it into a quarto-sized book (roughly the same aspect ratio as Letter, but somewhat smaller) with a glossy paperback cover. I'm very happy with how it's come out (apart from some minor things) - thanks to LaTeX it looks pretty professional.

It'll be interesting to see how many copies of this are sold, seeing as we are giving the content away for free electronically. Personally I find it much more convenient to have a book than to print out a PDF. And I should point out that we welcome further contributions to the documentation, so if you want to see your name up there in lights...I mean...on the front of a book, start sending in your chapters now!

Technical notes: The LaTeX for the PDF was generated from reStructuredText using a development version of Sphinx 1.1 so that URLs would be included as footnotes. The source is stored in a Mercurial repository at BitBucket. Feel free to fork to fix typos!

Image credit: Tim O'Sullivan

2 comments:

Egon Willighagen said...

Nice cover!

Noel O'Boyle said...

Thanks. Made with Inkscape. A bit of trial and error though to figure out the right size of image (why is this always so confusing?).