---
author: ''
category: ''
date: 2008/08/27 23:46
description: ''
link: ''
priority: ''
slug: BB743
tags: programming, python, rst2pdf
title: How pretty is rst2pdf's output? Take a look.
type: text
updated: 2008/08/27 23:46
url_type: ''
---
I am a big Alexandre Dumas fan. He's the direct ancestor of Neal Stephenson, so many of you should like him too. So I used one of his best books to try some automatic typesetting of project gutenberg texts.

No, the whole book did not convert without errors, and yes, there is *some* manual work in what you are about to see, but hey, take a look.

Here's a far look of the first two pages:

.. raw:: html

   <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ralsina/2805071804/" title="montecristo-1 by ralsina_2000, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3230/2805071804_a4f9933349_o.png" width="1440" height="863" alt="montecristo-1"></a>

And here's some detail of the typsetting:

.. raw:: html

   <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ralsina/2804222331/" title="montecristo-2 by ralsina_2000, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3295/2804222331_692d81f9f8_o.jpg" width="1016" height="351" alt="montecristo-2"></a>

Yes, the typesetting is not really LaTeX quality, but it's not bad, either.

Compare it with `the HTML version at project Gutenberg`_. The typesetting is a thing of **beauty** compared to that :-(

.. _the html version at project gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm

The image is a picture of Chateau d'If from flickr, released under Creative Commons. The title font is Scriptina, I chose it because it looks 19th century but modern.