Offline Reading
Exporting blog posts from HTML to ePub and PDF
- Published
- Updated
- (created )
- Written by
- Willem L. Middelkoop
- Topics
- blog · book · literature · programming · technology · writing
- Human version of this post
- https://willem.com/en/2026-01-19_offline-reading/
- Nederlands
- Offline Lezen
Summary
This year marks the 10th anniversary of my blog. What started as an experiment has evolved into over 170 stories, averaging around 60 thousand pageviews a month. I recently started translating posts into Dutch, German, and Spanish, expanding the reach. And now I am introducing support for offline reading by making all posts available as ePub and PDF downloads.
Full text
Why Offline?
Enjoy distraction free reading on e-ink devices like a Kobo or reMarkable which are kind to your eyes. Focus on the articles wherever and whenever you want as they are available as downloads that work offline and DRM-free. All willem.com ePubs and PDFs contain high quality images and feature beautiful resizable typography. I made a handy overview of ePub and PDF downloads here:
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How it works
The willem.com website runs on the Lemmid content management system that is a static site generator, outputting optimised HTML suitable for high volume traffic and international distribution. I extended the NodeJS code to automatically export to ePub and PDF by using simplified HTML as input. See the source code snippets below: for ePub I use the epub-gen module; for PDF I use pandoc and LaTeX. I made a task manager that queues output jobs for individual translations and file formats, spreading computational load on the backend.
Conclusion
The reactions I have received on my posts come from all over the world and they inspire me to keep writing. With ePub and PDF support I hope to expand my reach even further by enabling more ways to read the articles. Enjoy!