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sarabander
sicp-pdf
Perl2012–2025
sarabander / sicp-pdf

sicp-pdf

SICP PDF with Texinfo and LaTeX source

18Distinct people
18Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
4.4KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

SICP PDF with Texinfo and LaTeX source

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

I was going to drop a link to my favorite pdf version (with improved typesetting and graphics), but sadly the download link appears broken :(…

cellularmitosis used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year18 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2012-07-26 03:28:34 UTC to 2025-10-21 05:43:42 UTC.

012342012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20122013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
SICP Direct link: sicp.pdf This is a PDF version of "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, and Julie Sussman. It is a further development of the Unofficial Texinfo Format (UTF), which was originally derived from the HTML version at The MIT Press. Biggest change in this revision (2.andresraba5) is the conversion to LaTeX, which opens the door to design and customization possibilities that the massive CTAN archive enables. Also, the latest typesetting engine XeTeX can be used, along with the Unicode and OpenType goodness it brings. Source For macOS Users: The Inconsolata LGC and Linux Libertine fonts are not included in MacTex. You need to install them separately. Download the Inconsolata LGC fonts here and the Linux Libertine fonts here. To install the fonts system-wide, move all the downloaded .otf files into the /Library/Fonts folder. After completing these tasks, continue with the instructions below. The src directory contains both Texinfo and LaTeX sources. To recompile the book, go there and enter: $ make The file preamble.tex contains all the configuration and style declarations. Note that the LaTeX file sicp.tex will be generated on the fly, overwriting the previous version. To keep sicp.texi and sicp.tex in sync, I make changes to sicp.texi, which is already a hybrid of Texinfo and LaTeX code. This is fine, because all non-Texinfo content remains unchanged by the script. Chances for successful compilation are increased if you have almost complete installation of recent TeX Live distribution (the pdf here is compiled with 2012 release). The needed OpenType fonts must be installed in the operating system. You also need Inkscape to recreate image PDFs from SVGs. If compilation stops with "LaTeX Error: Too many unprocessed floats.", you could try to increase the width and height of text area in preamble. Newer TeX Live or updated fonts could result in different character metrics, so that some figures no longer fit. The problem is reported in issue #5. To clean up after the build: $ make clean This deletes the temporary files written during sicp.pdf creation, including sicp.pdf itself. Move it up to root directory if you want to keep it. To remove all the generated PDFs and auxiliary files in the whole src tree: $ make clean-all Acknowledgements Lytha Ayth Neil Van Dyke Gavrie Philipson J. E. Johnson Mingshen Sun holomorph Narumi Katoh tfgit Brian Wignall dine2014 License The files sicp.texi, sicp.pdf, and diagrams in directory src/fig are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (cc by-sa). The script files ex-fig-ref.pl, survey.rb, and texi-to-latex.pl are licensed under GNU General Public License version 3 (for details, see src/LICENSE). Sister project A new HTML5 version is out, bringing the advantages of adjustable font size and reflowable text to mobile reading. Translation There is a new Japanese translation of the PDF by Narumi Katoh. Great to see new languages joining the collection!
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

18 sources
I agree with the spirit of this comment: good typesetting is a delight, and TeX is the best tool I've seen for achieving it. We are lucky that its author made the result of his researches freely available, and that a community has kept it alive. I'll just point out that simply using LaTeX does not automatically guarantee great typesetting (you have to know what you want) though it does provide a baseline of decent paragraphs at least. Nit: TeX/LaTeX do not inherently avoid rivers (though see https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/29049/48 and https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/4507/48), and the body font in this PDF is not Garamond but Linux Libertine. The typesetting of this book seems due to Andres Raba (sarabander on GitHub), and the LaTeX is generated by a script from texinfo format: https://github.com/sarabander/sicp-pdf/tree/5b3a5b2/src
In Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1996) [pdf]
> Does anybody know where I can/should host a copy? With torrent or IPFS, perhaps? (Given the CC BY-SA license, this would be completely legal.) Also, GitHub's behaviour wrt to LFS is really disappointing — the epub file could have been stored normally with git (its size of ~ 3 MB is far less than the hard limit of 100 MB), in which case there would have been no issues of exceeding a data quota... For comparison, the linked PDF is normally indexed with git, despite weighing at 7.7 MB. Since LFS is supposed to reduce total bandwidth use for the hoster, GitHub is, in effect, punishing people for reducing GitHub's bandwidth usage... Actually, the linked PDF is originally[0] by the same author as the EPUB version you linked. However, in the original repository[0] the PDF is managed with LFS, so it's inaccessible... [0] https://github.com/sara
Read the rest
In Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1996) [pdf]
this was posted here a few weeks ago but for posterity [1][2] is an HTML5 and EPUB3 version of SICP with 'SVGs, mathematical markup with MathML and MathJax, embedded web fonts, and syntax highlighting'. there's a PDF version[3] from the same author with decent typesetting. additionally I came across [4], SICP in an interactive textbook form with editable code fragments. [1]: https://github.com/sarabander/sicp [2]: http://sarabander.github.io/sicp/ [3]: https://github.com/sarabander/sicp-pdf [4]: https://github.com/zodiac/isicp
In Why MIT Switched from Scheme to Python (2009)

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