# A book made with Hugo

**URL:** <https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/a-book-made-with-hugo/56581>\
**Category:** Showcases\
**Created:** [January 17, 2026, 8:40pm UTC](https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/a-book-made-with-hugo/56581 "2026-01-17T20:40:00Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![cmahnke](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/user_avatar/discourse.gohugo.io/cmahnke/32/14148_2.png) [@cmahnke](https://discourse.gohugo.io/u/cmahnke)\
**Post date:** [January 17, 2026, 8:40pm UTC](https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/a-book-made-with-hugo/56581/1 "2026-01-17T20:40:00Z")

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Hugo is mostly used to generate web sites. For on of my collections I reused a Hugo website to generate a book from it.  
Have a look here:

> **[The Kleiderbügel Blog as a book · Christian Mahnke](https://christianmahnke.de/en/post/coat-hangers-book/)**
>
> The catalogue of the collection

It’s done with a set of custom templates (tied to a output format) to generate a large HTML file and using [VivlioStyle](https://vivliostyle.org/) (and thus CSS for paged media) for the layout (and other things like the TOC).

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**Author:** ![iaeiou](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/user_avatar/discourse.gohugo.io/iaeiou/32/15332_2.png) [@iaeiou](https://discourse.gohugo.io/u/iaeiou)\
**Post date:** [January 18, 2026, 7:42am UTC](https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/a-book-made-with-hugo/56581/2 "2026-01-18T07:42:23Z")

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Thanks for sharing!

Now that the pipelines are in place, can you smoothly update your Hugo blog and publish an updated PDF?  
Which manual steps do you have to handle?

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![cmahnke](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/user_avatar/discourse.gohugo.io/cmahnke/32/14148_2.png) [@cmahnke](https://discourse.gohugo.io/u/cmahnke)\
**Post date:** [January 20, 2026, 10:21am UTC](https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/a-book-made-with-hugo/56581/3 "2026-01-20T10:21:11Z")

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Yes, its completely automated: different sections from the web site are mapped to book sections. Posts are the main part, a special `catalogue` setting is responsible for the frame (like front page, preface, text contents, blank pages and so on). So publishing a new post will result in a new book.

There are no manual steps, if you just see the book as a simple sequece of pages. But a rela book is more then that, there are some rules like having a start of a chapter always on a right side. This might create a requirement of blank pages. then there is the requirement that a TOC should always fit a the page, this required adjustments to the font size.  
Both things are certainly also possible automate, but that was to much effort for this project.