For the last couple of weeks I’ve been busy reading Fortran77 code in order to re-implement some of it in Java. Most of the code has been fairly easy to understand, even with no prior knowledge of Fortran. But at the end of last week I stumbled upon some code I could not grok. After googling a while I found a book by Dr. Clive G. Page; Professional Programmer’s Guide to Fortran77. This turned out to be a pretty good resource on the subject. However it’s source format is LaTeX and these days I really like EPUB.

Since the book is released under the GNU Free Documentation License I decided to use it as a test case for my recent efforts to add ePUB support to Mylyn Docs. As it turned out this was quite straightforward. I did find a few bugs in my ePUB producing code and latex2html produced some ugly HTML. But with some fixing, configuration tweaking and the help of sed and tidy I got a pretty decent result. If you’re interested in Fortran you’ll find the book as a download over at GitHub. Where you will also find an example of using the new epub Ant task.