Contents

PDFs for your book

It is possible to build a single PDF that contains all of your book’s content. This page describes a couple ways to do so.

Warning

PDF building is experimental, and may change or have bugs.

There are two approaches to building PDF files.

Build a PDF from your book HTML

It is possible to build a single PDF from your book’s HTML. This starts by converting all of your book’s content into a single HTML file, and then renders it as a PDF by emulating a browser from the command-line.

Installation

Your system will need to use pyppeteer to parse the generated HTML for conversion to PDF.

You can install it like so:

pip install pyppeteer

You may also need to install this bundle of packages below (on *nix systems):

gconf-service
libasound2
libatk1.0-0
libatk-bridge2.0-0
libc6
libcairo2
libcups2
libdbus-1-3
libexpat1
libfontconfig1
libgcc1
libgconf-2-4
libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0
libglib2.0-0
libgtk-3-0
libnspr4
libpango-1.0-0
libpangocairo-1.0-0
libstdc++6
libx11-6
libx11-xcb1
libxcb1
libxcomposite1
libxcursor1
libxdamage1
libxext6
libxfixes3
libxi6
libxrandr2
libxrender1
libxss1
libxtst6
ca-certificates
fonts-liberation
libappindicator1
libnss3
lsb-release
xdg-utils
wget

In addition, if you get errors about libraries that don’t exist, check out these install commands to see if that fixes it. We warned you it was an experimental feature :-)

Build

To build a single PDF from your book’s HTML, use the following command:

jupyter-book build mybookname/ --builder pdfhtml

or

jb build mybookname/ --builder pdfhtml

Warning

If you get a “MaxRetryError” and see mentions of SSL in the error message when building the PDF, this could be due to a bug in pyppeteer as it downloads Chromium for the first time. See this GitHub comment for a potential fix, and this Jupyter Book issue where we’re tracking the issue.

Control the look of PDF via HTML

Because you are using HTML as an intermediary for your book’s PDF, you can control the look and feel of the HTML via your own CSS rules. Most CSS changes that you make to your HTML website will also persist in the PDF version of that website. For information about how to define your own CSS rules, see Custom CSS or JavaScript.

To add CSS rules that only apply to the printed PDF, use the @media print CSS pattern to define print-specific rules. These will only be applied when the HTML is being printed, and will not show up in your non-PDF website.

For example, to hide the right table of contents at print time, you could add this rule:

@media print {
    .bd-toc {
        visibility: hidden;
    }
}

The right Table of Contents would be present in your live website, but hidden when someone printed a PDF of your website.

Build a PDF using LaTeX

You can also use LaTeX to build a PDF of your book. This can behave differently depending on your operating system and tex setup. This section tries to recommend a few best-practices.

Note

We recommend using the texlive distribution

Installation

For Debian-based Linux platforms it is recommended to install the following packages:

sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-recommended texlive-latex-extra \
                     texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-fonts-extra \
                     texlive-xetex latexmks

Alternatively you can install the full TeX Live distribution.

For OSX you may want to use MacTeX which is a more user friendly approach. Alternatively you may also use TeX Live.

For Windows users, please install TeX Live.

Build

To build a single PDF using LaTeX, use the following command:

jupyter-book build mybookname/ --builder pdflatex

or

jb build mybookname/ --builder pdflatex

Note

If you would just like to generate the latex file you may use:

jb build mybookname/ --builder latex

Updating the name of the PDF file

To update the name of your PDF file you can set the following in _config.yml

latex:
  latex_documents:
     targetname: book.tex

This will act as an automatic override when Sphinx builds the latex_documents. It is typically inferred by Sphinx but when using jupyter-book naming the file in the _config.yml generally makes it easier to find.

Using a different LaTeX engine

Some users may want to switch to using a different LaTeX engine to build the PDF files. For example, if your project contains Unicode you will need to use xelatex to build the PDF file.

To update the LaTeX engine to xelatex you can add the following to your _config.yml

latex:
  latex_engine: xelatex

Note

We will be making xelatex the default in the near future, so this can be used to specify other builders such as pdflatex, or lualatex.

See the Sphinx documentation for available builders

Other Sphinx LaTeX settings

Other LaTeX settings available to Sphinx can be passed through using the config section of Sphinx in the _config.yml file for your project.

For example, if you would like to set the latex_toplevel_sectioning option to use part instead of chapter you would use:

sphinx:
  config:
    latex_toplevel_sectioning: 'part'
Utterances Custom Sphinx configuration