How to build zig book as PDF on Fedora?

Jakub T. Jankiewicz

I planned to learn Zig Programming Language, and found a Zig Book, but I wanted to read it on my reMarkable tablet, the problem was that officially Zig book is only in HTML format, and don't support building PDF file from source. That's why it's not part of its documentation. But with quarto publishing system, used by the book, it's possible to create a PDF file.

Below is the instruction how to create a PDF version of Zig Book yourself. The instructions are for Fedora GNU/Linux, because this is what I'm using, but building on Ubuntu or different Linux distro should be similar. You only need to find the right package names to install.

Zig book require zig in version 0.14.0 and when this article was written,

the Fedora package had version 0.13.0. So when the version of zig is not up to date. You need to install zig from source.

Install Zig from Source

To compile zig you need to:

clone zig repo:

git clone https://github.com/ziglang/zig.git --depth 1

install dependencies

sudo dnf install -y cmake make lld-devel llvm-devel \
clang-devel clang-tools-extra-devel libxml2-devel

build zig:

cd zig
mkdir build
cd build
CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/usr/ cmake ..
sudo make install

make install take a while, you can do something else and check from time to time if the compilation finished.

After it finishes, you should be able to run zig:

whereis zig
zig: /usr/bin/zig /usr/lib/zig

zig will be installed in /usr/bin/ directory (by default it compiled into ./stage3 directory, by adding environment variable CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH we are forcing to install it into root directory).

Build Zig Book as PDF

Now it's time to build the PDF version of the Zig Book:

First, you need to clone git repository:

git clone https://github.com/pedropark99/zig-book.git --depth 1

Then install dependencies

sudo dnf install R R-knitr R-rmarkdown R-readr texlive \
texlive-tikzfill texlive-tcolorbox texlive-fontawesome5 \
rsvg-convert

Next is to install quarto publishing system, you can't install it from Fedora repository you need to download a Tar Ball from official website. Check installation instructions.

After installation of dependencies, you can build zig book:

cd zig-book
quarto render --to pdf

It may take a while to build it. The output file should be located in:

./zig-book/docs/Introduction-to-Zig.pdf

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