Converting Linux Documentation to MOBI for the Amazon Kindle
Linux Manual Pages
VIM Help Documentation
Gentoo Documentation
Linux Manual Pages
Groff to HTML to MOBI
Your Linux system likely has the Man package installed, it's installed
on almost all basic Linux systems to read the Linux Manual Pages, and
packages a command line tool called "man2html".
I've created a custom script called man2html-convertall.sh
to convert all of your system installed man pages to HTML into the /tmp
folder. From here, you can use Amazon's KindleGen to convert the
resulting HTML files to MOBI. And then, copy them to your Kindle
device, preferably to a sub-folder of the documents folder.
The process is quite simple, and you can try performing the process manually on individual files:
$ cp /usr/share/man/man1/bash.1.bz2 ./
(The file suffix may change depending on your distribution's choice of compression.)
$ bzip2 -d bash.1.bz2
(Or gunzip -d bash.1.gz)
$ man2html bash.1> bash.html
$ kindlegen -c2 bash.html
You don't need the "-c2", but for larger files it might be a good
thing. It can reduce the file size by half for the Bash Manual
Page. A lot of manual pages are quite small, and kindlegen will
automatically disable the compression if the file is too small. I
haven't done benchmarking, but common sense tells me using compression
on with a small CPU might be counter intuitive, causing the file to open
and render more slower then a non-compressed file. kindlegen
without any options, prints it's help page.
Pray for an open sourced kindlegen, as the <table>
<border=0> work around can then be worked into the code somewhere
along with other bug fixes. For now, the
AmazonKindlePublishingGuidelines.pdf advises authors of HTML pages of
the limitations of this HTML tag and how to format their pages for the
Amazon Kindle Devices.
VIM Help Documentation
Text to HTML to MOBI
The /usr/share/vim/vim73/doc/vim2html.pl script can convert all VIM Help
text files to HTML. From there, one can use kindlegen to convert
all HTML files to MOBI.
$ mkdir /tmp/html && cd /tmp/html
$ /usr/share/vim/vim73/doc/vim2html.pl /usr/share/vim/vim73/doc/tags /usr/share/vim/vimfiles/doc/*.txt
$ kindlegen *.html
And copy the *.mobi files to your device.
$ mkdir /media/Kindle/documents/vim && cp *.mobi /media/Kindle/documents/vim
Gentoo Documentation
XML to HTML to MOBI (using the lazy Seamonkey method)
All Gentoo documentation is in XML format and available by CVS
(gentoo/xml co 351MB). This includes the installation, developer
handbook as well as a multitude of other documentation, including their
foriegn language equivalents.
The only method I know so far, is to select the Print View option within
the page of the Seamonkey (Mozilla or Firefox) Browser, to get all
pages within one page. Save the file as HTML
(File > Save Page), which will save the page along with all graphics
(and saving all the graphics within a subfolder). You can then use
kindlegen on the
individual HTML page saved.
If you know of any command line methods of converting the multiple page
Gentoo XML documentation downloaded via CVS to one page of HTML, let me
know! I'm sure, with some time, one could make sure all HTML files
are linked properly so kindlegen can link all pages. For now, one
page HTML is just easier. An EPUB version of the Gentoo
documentation would be great, as conversion from EPUB to MOBI using
kindlegen provides some of the best results.