For my parents’ 26th anniversary, I decided to convert an online religious text they read into a beautiful, well-typeset book.

The online text was built by volunteers using an archaic version of Microsoft Word and looks like this:

Anyone who has read science or math literature is exposed to the high-quality output LaTeX produces.

Fortunately LaTeX’s abilities extend far beyond the domain of mathematical symbols.

I was able to combine Clojure’s excellent HTML processing infrastructure (enlive) and LaTeX to produce a nice looking document.

The entire process took a few hours.

Here are two pages from the final output:

This blog post contains latex and clojure snippets to produce that output. I am not good at designing books or combining typefaces and would appreciate advice.

It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.

— Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino)