Reading emacs documentation on a tablet

Reading emacs documentation on a tablet

Sometimes, when I’m in a middle of some important task, and I need to check something in documentation, I find something interesting I didn’t know about before, so I catch myself thinking that I should go through this part from the start to the end later. Then, on my way to anywhere, I think that it would be good to have that part of documentation on my tablet.

I knew there is a way to export emacs info documentation to e-book format, I just wasn’t sure how to do that. It turned out to be a pretty simpe task, so here is how I do it now.

Since we need a source (texi) of info files, lets get a source of emacs. I use Ubuntu with ppa:ubuntu-elisp/ppa for emacs, so getting its source files is easy as:

cd ~/src
apt-get source emacs-snapshot
cd emacs-snapshot-201407022054~ubuntu14.04.1/doc/misc

Now I will export eshell.texi to html:

texi2html eshell.texi

And to get that into epub format I will use ebook-convert script that comes with Calibre:

ebook-convert eshell.html .epub --authors "John Wiegley & Aidan Gauland"

This tool has many features and different options described in online Manual page.

So now I have eshell.epub I can put into my tablet and read in any e-book reader application.