Markdown -> Pandoc -> Book creation

The real Future Proof solution

I am writing several books and i want to keep all sources as plain text files, since for too many reasons i don't want to use Word Processors or DTP to keep the sources of my writings.

This template is to create a book in PDF/ePub/html/Docx format from a group of markdown files.

I needed this because i wanted a single source project to feed into Pandoc (the universal document converter) current editors book exporters (Ulysses, Scrivener, Zettlr, iA Writer, Marked 2...) were limited, and my preferred one Obsidian.md doesn't export... yet. I know there other solutions, like BookDown (which uses R Studio), or AsciiDoc, reStructured text etc.. but i wanted to stay in Markdown because i love to edit this simple format.

Syntax

pandoc -d config_pdf.yaml manuscript/*.md
pandoc -d config_epub.yaml manuscript/*.md
pandoc -d config_docx.yaml manuscript/*.md
pandoc -d config_html.yaml manuscript/*.md

## to build the advanced book (experimental, needs full MacTeX)
pandoc -d config_advanced_pdf.yaml manuscript_advanced/*.md

Requirements

• Install Pandoc (version 2.11 at least): Installing Pandoc.
• Install a LaTeX distribuition. under mac i could work with the smaller BasicTeX

i installed both with:

brew install pandoc
brew install homebrew/cask/basictex

Update: i've moved to the much bigger but really complete MacTeX-2020 Distribution

How To

the book is in the manuscript/ directory as a group of markdown files. indeed we call Pandoc with manuscript/*.md which feeds all the .md files, that's why we prefix the files with the numered order

most of the book metadata are in the 000_metadata.md file, check there all the options. the other settings are in the config_.yaml

the generated files are in the output/ directory.

Please Contribute

If you like this procedure and find an new feature or optimization, please share or create a PR I'd like to help the world to create and publish better Future Proof book easily

Thanks

• https://brainbaking.com/post/2020/05/using-pandoc/
• https://blog.semanticart.com/2014/01/11/writing-hypertext-fiction-in-markdown/
• https://github.com/maehr/academic-pandoc-template
• https://github.com/adunning/pandoc-ebook
• https://github.com/johnpaulada/pandoc-markdown-book-template
• https://github.com/Carleslc/Readteractive
• http://mcdemarco.net/tools/scree/

License

This project is loved by Stefano Cecere and .md friends and licensed under the MIT License see LICENSE.md