Ableton Forum

I noticed an earlier post about publishing the Live manual for reading on Kindle or other e-reader devices. For some reason, can't find that topic anymore, though searching for "kindle" will find the hit for it.

Anyhoo, I'd also like to see the manual in a format other than just PDF as well. Preferrably ePUB, which can easily be converted into other formats, like .mobi for Kindle.

I've "converted" the existing Live .pdf manual to my Kindle by cropping it with a PDF editor, to remove the annotations on the side - not perfect, but it's a lot more readable than with the annotations on the side. If there's any interest, and if Ableton doesn't mind, I'd be happy to post the cropped PDF somewhere ...

I'd also be happy to work with someone from Ableton on an ePUB version of the doc

I'm seriously thinking of taking advantage of the Live for Max offer ending this week, and it appears it's doc (ie, in patches/docs/tutorials) would be very amenable to format-shifting. Wondering what C74 would think of alternate formats of their docs? I will admit that having the docs "open" in this format is really another factor drawing me towards the product.

I noticed opening the web based pdf in safari on my ipod (and I guess it works on iPad) offers to open the pdf in iBooks. I now have the manual stored on my ipod touch and I can take it off/put it on with itunes! Still not much good for Kindles though I guess.

PDFs on the Kindle suffer a number of problems. Getting it to "basically display properly" while not having to zoom is the only thing I can "fix", which I did by cropping the PDF. There's very limited-to-none search/indexing/linking possible, which means you can really only read the manual serially. Pain.

The basic document structure of the existing Live manual would lend itself to HTML rendering pretty well, I think. Just don't happen to have that HTML.

I looked a bit more a the Max doco last night - it's largely in XML, in their own set of XML dialects, which they provide XSLT transforms for to convert to HTML dynamically. Didn't realize people actually did that (I stopped years ago - XSLT support is pretty crappy cross-browser). But, should make it easy to generate stand-alone HTML for it, which I can then convert to .mobi format with Calibre, or something.

pmuellr wrote:PDFs on the Kindle suffer a number of problems. Getting it to "basically display properly" while not having to zoom is the only thing I can "fix", which I did by cropping the PDF. There's very limited-to-none search/indexing/linking possible, which means you can really only read the manual serially. Pain.

The basic document structure of the existing Live manual would lend itself to HTML rendering pretty well, I think. Just don't happen to have that HTML.

I looked a bit more a the Max doco last night - it's largely in XML, in their own set of XML dialects, which they provide XSLT transforms for to convert to HTML dynamically. Didn't realize people actually did that (I stopped years ago - XSLT support is pretty crappy cross-browser). But, should make it easy to generate stand-alone HTML for it, which I can then convert to .mobi format with Calibre, or something.

Hey - you manage to get anything sorted for this? Would love the Live manual in ePub?

Cheers,
Phil.

splitloop wrote:Hey - you manage to get anything sorted for this? Would love the Live manual in ePub?

No, don't think I'd give an .epub conversion a try without the manual in some kind of convertable format (word might be ok, for instance). PDF isn't really convertable. If you were really desperate, there are some tools to extract text from PDFs, but then you'd lose the pictures. Sidebar annotations likely wouldn't work right either. Calibre (open source ebook converter) may be able to do this kind of conversion.

At this point, I do a most of my e-reading (PDFs and EPUBs) on my iPad with iBook. The existing Live 8 Manual looks pretty good there - pages are readable by my elderly eyes, links work, auto-generated TOC is too low-level but ok, etc. The only thing that really needs improvement for the PDF is to use color screen shots instead of the black and white.

As an aside, not sure why the images ARE black and white. It's unlikely someone's going to print this 550 page manual, or that even if they did, that having color images would screw them up. The manual would likely be bigger, but ... who cares.

Please, Ableton, do a "Wizard of Oz" for us, and take us from a black&white world to a color one, for the next manual!

+1 for epub

I just got a Kindle for Christmas and was excited to download my manuals to it...until I tried it lol. Pdfs are no good. We definitely need an epub version.

I have converted the pdf manual for Ableton 9 to epub and mobi (for kindle).

- A few diagrams was not possible to convert
- A few images is missing numbered arrows
- Page jumps does not work
- short keys chapter is missing, was to garbled
- Some double consonants was eaten by goblins. (No, really they are gone )

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6sn4hj1y2dsf ... MWUVa?dl=0

I converted with calibre, but had to adjust all images by hand as they were not in their correct place.

Got tired of my old conversion and had to fix it. Created a ruby script that scrapes the manual from Abletons site change all urls to relative urls on images and links and download all images. Then it's easy to convert other formats with calibre. Just drag in the index.html file to calibre.

This fixes all issues I had previously!

There is only one remaining issue.

- Images in the mobi file has a slight left margine for some unknown reason.

The script can be cloned from here:

https://github.com/lindroth/ableton_manual

The mobi(kindle) and epub files can be downloaded from here:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6sn4hj1y2dsf ... MWUVa?dl=0

Rickard wrote:Got tired of my old conversion and had to if it. Created a ruby script that scrapes the manual from Abletons site change all urls to relative urls on images and links and download all images.

Wow, nice! Thanks!

Yo, Thanks for sharing

Hey Ableton team, if you're listening, you should put this port on Amazon for free Kindle download.

A) It's a great way to market your product.
B) It makes your users super happy, which is also a great way to market your product
C) It's a great way to make your users happy
D) The only cost should be bug/virus testing it, or alternatively, paying a subcontractor to convert your PDF to mobi. The user already created a script to do it!

Fuck the police!

Rickard wrote:Got tired of my old conversion and had to fix it. Created a ruby script that scrapes the manual from Abletons site change all urls to relative urls on images and links and download all images. Then it's easy to convert other formats with calibre. Just drag in the index.html file to calibre.

This fixes all issues I had previously!

There is only one remaining issue.

- Images in the mobi file has a slight left margine for some unknown reason.

The script can be cloned from here:

https://github.com/lindroth/ableton_manual

The mobi(kindle) and epub files can be downloaded from here:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6sn4hj1y2dsf ... MWUVa?dl=0

Wow, thank you so much. I've been struggling to read the manual in .pdf format on my Kindle Fire for the last month. From what I've seen so far, the .mobi format is perfect on the Kindle Fire. The Ableton manual is now a very enjoyable read thanks to your hard work. Thank you, my man!

The document properties of the Live manual show it was made with Adobe InDesign. InDesign has an epub export function which works great, if the document is created properly. I really wonder why there are still no official epub/mobi manuals for any DAW (not only Ableton Live).

Any chance this could be updated for 10? Could use that mobi!