syedpeer / bookbuilder

A simple template and workflow for publishing books with Pandoc

A Simple Book Build Pipeline with Pandoc

This repository is a simple build process for making books with Pandoc. It was used to publish The Complete Guide to Rails Performance and The Ruby on Rails Performance Apocrypha.

This configuration creates PDF, EPUB, TXT, and HTML build artifacts.

Usage

Put contents (I use Markdown, but because it's Pandoc, you can use almost any format for input) inside the /content directory. They will be concatenated in alphabetical order to form the book, so I typically use something like the following structure:

content/00_introduction.md 
content/01_first_chapter.md 
content/02_second_chapter.md
...

h1 and h2 will cause a page break, using the CSS I have in the pandoc folder. I like to have "sub sections" in my books, so I use h1 for the section headers and h2 for chapter headers. h3 and below can be used for emphasis but do not appear in the table of contents.

Images go in the img folder.

The pandoc/epub_metadata.md file is a special place for putting epub-specific metadata.

$ make and $ make clean build and delete the build artifacts, respectively.

$ make wordcount will count the words in the content folder.