How to print Swift 2.0 iBook

Because of the copyright it is not possible to print it in a legal way.

Reason for printing?

I wish they would come out with a PDF of it because, I cannot read my iPad and flip back to the screen on my Mac without my eyes going bad. I would rather read from a printout (also, making notes is a whole lot easier).

I really do hate the current trend of making all the new documentation web or ibook only. It really makes things difficult.

Why not read it in iBooks for Mac?

I posted how to do this in the "old" forums: https://devforums.apple.com/message/1120684#1120684 using a technique Erica Sadun created (reference in the thread above). Essentially you use SiteSucker to pull the HTML to a local folder, then use Calibre to reformat the HTML in PDF or some ebook format.

That said, its not working today. There is some kind of "access" issue - while Apple seems perfectly happy to let me view the Swift online HTML using any browser without even logging in, when SiteSucker tries to download it I get a 401 Access Failure. Sent this to SiteSucker support, but I'm not optimistic.

BTW - there is a bug in the Apple Mac App Store version of SiteSucker so the new version won't work in any case. Erica used the older free 7.6.2 version which worked fine for Swift 1.2

iBooks for the Mac isn't my favorite reader. I like paper and PDF because you can put it on eInk devices that don't hurt the eyes.

I too love a good paper copy. I still have my first Obj-C / Cocoa papers with my highlights and notes. 😟

I would kill for a paper copy. I remember asking about a paper copy of the Cocoa docs back when WWDC actually had feedback forums (remember those). They asked the audience how many people would buy a set, and other then myself, there was maybe one or two other hands in a full room. I guess I'm just getting old in that I like reading technical documents on paper. Oh well.

I like paper too - we probably both have gray hair (if any hair at all 🙂). However, the frameworks change so often not sure it would be productive to print out 5000 pages of paper every few months.

What I often do is print out the Guides - those change at a slower pace. Also, I bought a Kindle for the sole purpose of reading Swift docs while sitting in a sand chair at the beach, in bright light. Or read them on long flights.

I haven't heard back yet from SiteSucker. Since I can access the index.html file using 'curl', I can only suppose the Apple server knows about SiteSucker and disables it from accessing the files. Really - if we could just get the book directly none of this would come into play.

Has any one found a way ?

Well, actually I've just had some success, with help from the SiteSucker developer. Notes on this:

- there are actual .epub files now for the Swift preview docs, but they are DRM'ed and cannot be read by calibre (but you can read both in iBooks)

- per my link in an earlier reply, you can use an older free version of SiteSucker (2.4.6 is the last free version) to download the Swift Web Sites

- the latest paid SiteSucker has some issues due to sandboxing, and may or may not ever be able to download these sites

- the one new required setting is under Advanced, Options, "Generate HTML" - it must be set (this is called "Use Web Views" in later releases

Now you can pull in the Swift web pages to your local machine. You then drop the index.html file into "calibre", and it reads in the site. You would then use "calibre" to output HTML. This gets a bit trickey - if you don't do anything, you will get little iPhone sized pages with a huge Font Size. So tap the "Output" button, then select PDF in the upper right, and then tap "PDF Options" in the left pane. I set the size to be Letter, and the font size to be 14 or something. Experiment. If you find a nice set of options please update your post.

I was also able to create a mobi book which I successfully loaded on my Kindle, for reading on the beach! The output is not as pretty or well structured, but it is useable.

Don't forget to make a contribution to "calibre", and to purchase a real copy of SiteSucker from the Mac App store!

>Need a pdf version of Swift 2.0 pre release to print and study.

Apple apparently treats these and other examples as controlled documents, meaning they are subject to change and should only be referenced from the latest version direct from them.

When fossilized (as in a printed version), they run the risk of feeding outdated content into current use, creating confusion that would necessitate a repeated warning that the dev's issue perhaps centers around old reference material - this is a great way to waste valuable support effort, I think. By reducing confusion, having one version in circulation works as a benefit for both support and dev.

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I would also add that you can go to the Swift Programming Guide page, select a topic from the left side, then print the resulting page. I did this recently for 3 topics I wanted to read up on. The printout is quite readable. In 10 min you could probably print most of the guide. There is probably some way to scrape the first page, then use an Automator script to print out every section, but I just don't have the need for this myself.