I wanted to experiment with using mdbook to add Table of Contents, search, and theme functionality to an HTML book. Since Markdown allows embedded HTML I figured it might be a simple task -- and it was.

I used the HTML format of a Project Gutenberg eBook for sample content. I extracted its css and chapters into individual files as follows:

1,152w! src/Gutenberg.css
153,204w! src/about.md
205,410w! src/CONTENTS.md
411,1510w! src/chapter-01.md
1511,2581w! src/chapter-02.md
2582,3352w! src/chapter-03.md
3353,4434w! src/chapter-04.md
4435,5285w! src/chapter-05.md
5286,6346w! src/chapter-06.md
6347,7288w! src/chapter-07.md
7289,8451w! src/chapter-08.md
8452,9377w! src/chapter-09.md
9378,10376w! src/chapter-10.md
10377,11458w! src/chapter-11.md
11459,12566w! src/chapter-12.md
12789,12877w! src/notes.md

I then moved the images directory from the ebook to the src directory so image links would work correctly.

Other than the standard creation of a SUMMARY.md file, and adding the two additional-css files (font-family.css, Gutenberg.css) to book.toml I only made these functional changes:

• To prevent text flowing around right justified paragraphs (class="right nomt") I added following horizontal lines (--- in chapters 1, 10, 11, and 12.)

• To fix broken links in CONTENTS.md that referred to page numbers in the single HTML file, I preceded them with their chapter numbers, i.e. "chapter-02.html#ii" and "chapter-02.html#door".

You can change the book to any "Web-safe" font by modifying font-family.css appropriately.