[Note: I’ve released a new rev of the book as of 11-11-2025, and that’s what the link below will fetch for you.]
I fixed a raft of typos and other minor issues in my free PDF ebook FreePascal from Square One, and I uploaded it to my WordPress instance at this URL:
http://www.contrapositivediary.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/FreePascalFromSquareOne-11-11-2025.pdf
This link is present above, and also at the end of my WordPress page entitled, “My Currently Available Books.” Click the link and download the PDF. It’s a biggie, as a 354-page PDF probably has to be, at 5.7 megabytes.
The big win in this release is that it has a clickable TOC for the whole book in a window to the left of the page display itself. So no matter where you are in the book, you can click a different chapter title shown in the TOC window (which lists all of them) and be there with that one click.
I didn’t create this TOC, though I realize now I’d better learn more about PDF internals and how to create and change them. No, Contra reader Robert Riebisch built the TOC for me and installed it into the most recent release, which I edited a little this morning and present to you as the update for 9-13-2025.
As an aside: Are there any recommendations for a solid technical book on creating and changing PDF files?
For those who haven’t heard about the book before: It’s a distillation of (almost) all my books on Pascal, from Complete Turbo Pascal in 1985 to Borland Pascal 7 from Square One in 1993. (The only book I didn’t draw from was Turbo Pascal Solutions, published in 1988 and mostly about DOS-specific tricks with Turbo Pascal 3.0.)
I released the book under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. What this means is that it really and truly is a free ebook. You can pass it around, post it on your site, give it to anybody who wants it. I have suggested it to homeschooling parents and college kids and many others. It’s an intro not simply to Pascal but to the ideas behind programming itself. The FreePascal compiler is free, so given that I’ve long since made decent money on those books, I decided to make the book free too.
The book uses the Lazarus IDE that comes with FreePascal for editing and debugging, but note well that it doesn’t cover GUI programming with Lazarus. The example programs, when run, display output as text in a console window. I have begun a book on GUI programming with Lazarus, but that requires knowledge of object-oriented programming, which I just didn’t have room to cover in FreePascal from Square One.
So it’s there. Go get it. Let your Pascal-writing friends know about it, and pass it along. It’s free, and always will be.
Thank you!
Consider this book from the American Bar Association:
https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guide-Adobe%C2%AE-Acrobat%C2%AE-DC/dp/1641058935
The ABA has lots of good books.
For a very long time I have used Acrobat Pro for lots of projects. (Remember the DeepSpace 1 CD? All PDF). What happened is I lost the magic for Adobe when they forced me to get Adobe Pro as SAAS. For a brief while, I was paying $30 a month for the privilege of using Acrobat!
I used an older version for a while, but I could not move it to my new computer. The licensing/checking server had been removed by Adobe.
I use Word 365 to create PDF documents. It does a great job. Save as PDF or .docx. Word can also edit text based PDF (PDF also is sometimes binary images.Word can’t help with those.)
For working with digital documents, I use Corel PDF Fusion. This allows you create, read, and write many, many types of documents and then merge them into PDF, shuffle and rotate pages, that sort of thing. It is a one-time buy. Corel has it on sale often. $40 to $60.
https://www.wordperfect.com/en/product/pdf-creator/index.html?partnumber=OL_PDF01&quantity=1
I deleted Adobe Reader, too. I was annoyed by the continuing offers to upgrade me.
Don
Jeff, thanks for updating this excellent Pascal resource, and thanks to Robert for his work on the TOC. Free Pascal & Lazarus are my preferred programming tools. On occasion, I startup Turbo Pascal 7 on DosBox just to reminisce. I also like C#, but being tied to the .NET runtime can be a nuisance.
@Jeff Why is FreePascalFromSquareOne-10-21-2025.pdf nearly four times larger than your original release?
Hmmm. Probably embedded font issues. I changed fonts with this release. Thanks for letting me know. Could you tell me which release date the one you’re calling original is? I’ve been working on this thing since 2010, and releasing what I have now and then even before it was finished.
I meant FreePascalFromSquareOne-5-7-2025.pdf and FreePascalFromSquareOne-9-8-2025.pdf.
Ok. The problem is with the TOC. I exported the current InDesign file to PDF, and without a TOC it’s 6.2 MB. I copied the TOC from the 9-13 PDF Bookmarks window and pasted it into the 11-11 Bookmarks window, and boom! The file size blows up to 20.2 MB. This is weird, because older versions have a TOC and yet are in the 6 MB vicinity. My guess is that copying bookmarks copies something else as well, and the Audit Space Usage summary shows 70% of the file is taken up by Structure Info…whateverthehell that is. Still working on it. Will post a new entry and ask for help from my readers, in case I have some PDF experts among them. So hang in there. I’ll fix this one way or another.
Ok, fixed. Here’s the link to the version I uploaded a little earlier this morning:
http://www.contrapositivediary.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/FreePascalFromSquareOne-11-11-2025.pdf
5.7 MB. I still don’t know what happened to the 10-21-2025 version to make it so huge.
@Jeff Because it’s such a simple task when using pdf.tocgen/pdftocio I created a TOC-including version from your latest release. You can find it at https://www.bttr-software.de/download/FreePascalFromSquareOne-11-11-2025-toc.pdf