costoffreedom / costoffreedom-book

Cost of Freedom for Gitbook

Cost of Freedom

The Cost of Freedom is a book that started with a book sprint in Pourrières, France from November 2nd to 6th, 2015, and contributions from around the world. The book is one of many projects inspired by and demanding freedom for Bassel Khartabil, loved and celebrated Internet volunteer detained in Syria since 15 March 2012. #FREEBASSEL!

The was published at the end of the book sprint, but the topic remains vital and mission unfulfilled. To facilitate further edits and enhancements, the book sources have been migrated to GitHub and published with GitBook. Feel free and encouraged to open issues, propose edits (or even entirely new chapters), make translations, fork, copy, excerpt, share, promote, and otherwise make your own.

Technical details

Source and issues are available at GitHub.

Current build is available on gitbook.com with the HTML version published to book.costoffreedom.cc.

Build manually

Follow instructions at Gitbook:

npm -g install gitbook
gitbook serve
gitbook build

To build PDF and Epub locally, you need ebook-convert (packaged in Calibre):

gitbook pdf . ./costoffreedom.pdf

As of writing there are bugs in the gitbook toolchain that prevent it from generating EPUB files that will pass all validation checks. In order to overcome these problems, you can use a forked version of gitbook.

Clone the forked version:

git clone -b custom [email protected]:christopheradams/gitbook.git ~/gitbook-custom
cd ~/gitbook-custom
npm install

Link the gitbook command to the custom version:

gitbook versions:link ~/gitbook-custom

Now every time you run the gitbook command, it will use the custom version.

gitbook epub . ./costoffreedom.epub

You can see what version you are using with the command:

gitbook versions

To stop using the custom version:

gitbook versions:uninstall latest

To upload on Lulu, you need to add proper metadata. Use the folowing script

sh bin/create_ebook.sh

Build clean PDF with Latex

latexmk and pandoc are required.

make pdf

you will need xelatex and Scherazade font for Arabic language

sudo apt-get install texlive-xetex fonts-sil-scheherazade

License

CC0-1.0

costoffreedom-book's Issues

2 introduction chapters

https://www.gitbook.com/book/costoffreedom/costoffreedom-book/details (ToC) claims two, the first to a 404 link. Presumably one should be removed. I don't immediately see how to do it.

need a Makefile command to release PDF

Basically need to

• build pdf
• bump a version number
• upload to different locations

Currently the pdf is located in costoffreedom/costoffreedom.cc and costoffreedom/costoffreedom-book

Get a clean PDF using Latex

Following #6 and the few options offered by gitbook regarding styling, it is way better to use Latex to generate a clean version for print.

This can be done already by using the make pdf command. It will first convert .md files to .tex following the order, then use the .cls Latex class and main file .tex in /tex folder to compile.

latexmk and pandoc are required

pdf.css

The rendered pdf https://www.gitbook.com/download/pdf/book/costoffreedom/costoffreedom-book has two behaviors I'd like to get rid of:

• In the table of contents, displays (filename.html) next to each entry. I guess this could be useful for debugging purposes but doesn't help readers.
• Chapter titles are shown twice, probably once as specified in chapter markdown title, once as specified in SUMMARY.md

Both of these behaviors are probably specified in pdf.css -- if I rename it, they both go away. But I can't figure out what in pdf.css specifies those behaviors. pdf.css seems to be very complicated, I suspect ought be blanked except for some minimum styles we explicitly want. @clemsos it looks like you created the pdf.css. I'm probably missing some obvious things. Thoughts?

Disappearing text with Safari?

Report from a friend:

One operational note: there is something funky with Gitbook. Your rant loads just fine, but if I move the mouse around, all the text disappears. This is repeatable with latest Safari on the lasted Mac OS X.

Cover review

Anything to add / modify on this cover ?
18767186_cover.pdf

consider new cover or updated cover for new edition

improved red? or black with white painting or new cover al together? new one should stand out from the released version

Get generated EPUB to pass epubcheck

To get an EPUB accepted at most online retailers, it has to pass a validation step. You can test an EPUB locally using epubcheck.

Unfortunately gitbook does not always generate error-free EPUB files, mostly due to the markdown parser not writing valid XHTML in some edge cases (e.g., footnotes, heading id's).

Assuming you've installed gitbook-cli, and cloned this book in your home directory, and downloaded epubcheck:

cd costoffreedom-book
gitbook epub . ~/costoffreedom.epub

cd ~/epubcheck-4.0.1
java -jar epubcheck.jar -out ~/epubcheck.xml ~/costoffreedom.epub

Here's the output:

costoffreedom-epubcheck.xml.txt

Bassel drawing is in low-def

https://github.com/costoffreedom/costoffreedom-book/blob/master/images/ml-free-bassel-900-1.jpg
We need hi-res image to print maybe. Do we have it ?

Images removed from book

@clemsos you deleted all the images with dc74ac4 ... the chaper tocs had them, and the collective-memory free bassel chapter consisted of only an image. Was this intentional?

Setup at http://book.costoffreedom.cc/

Should redirect to gibook.com/costoffreedom/costoffreedom-book

Need a suitable book size

To release on Lulu, we have to fit some standard size (not the case now, based on the Booksprint released version) Which size ?

Those with the green star are eligible for retail disctribution : http://connect.lulu.com/t5/ISBN-Distribution/Which-Products-are-Eligible-for-Retail-Distribution/ta-p/33150

Do we need it to be eligible for retail distribution ? (see costoffredom/costoffredom.cc#48) http://www.lulu.com/sell ?

Font and overall apperance of published result is quite ugly

Maybe we could port the work Julien did on the first version of the book
: https://github.com/costoffreedom/oldies/tree/master/original-book

double or triple printing of contributor bios

Contributors are listed with bios

• bottom of each chapter
• at end in contributor list
• gratuitously again, one page for each contributor

At least the 3rd ought go.

I suggest the bio could appear just once, either in the first or second, probably second. Name(s) only for chapters.

get ISBN ?

looks like a requirement for Lulu and will officially make it a book :)

@christopheradams any idea of how to do it ?