WPTeX

What is this exactly?

This is not a wordpress plugin, but a separate program that will help you generate a very nicely typeseted book (the best actually) from the posts you already have in you wordpress blog.

Why do I need it?

Suppose you have a wondeful blog with a rich and useful content —don't we all? :) And you want to create a book from all this content to offer it, or sell it or whatever. You can copy/paste everything in your Openoffice or Microsoft word program and generate a file that you convert to a pdf, or simply use this program to generate a tex file that you can convert to a pdf.

So it's the same thing, right?

No! Of course NO! Documents produced with a TeX file are far much better that those produced with any WYSIWYG editor. The typesetting is better, the manipulation of styles, text and actually everything is simpler and gives you more power and customization. You can find out more on this subject by reading this excellent article and this one.

Do I have to learn L^AT_EX ?

Short answer: NO. But some little knowledge on how it works will help you give a very personalized touch to the books you create. Don't worry! It's really very easy and not, as you might think, a geeks-only playground!

How do I convert a .tex file to a .pdf?

It depends on the platform you're on. But there's for sure a tool for you!

If you're using linux, your distro already includes LaTeX, or if not that will be easy to ser up. If you're a mac, take a look at this set of tools and download TexShop. If you're a windows user, go for ProTeXt or MiKTeX.

The generated PDF doesn't have a table of content

That's very common, don' worry. Execute your tex-to-pdf converter twice.

The generated PDF doesn't have an index

use the command mkindex.

Gimme a smart idea?

Tis not a question! But you can modify WPTeX a little bit, set a cron on your server and generate a periodical version of your book :)