Make a Book from markdown files

Why ?

Every now and then I have wanted to transform my investigations , written as blog posts, into books

Also occured to me that I want to write a book. But each chapter was self sufficient. And transforming different chapters into a book required manual labor . That for this software application, that has as purpose to transform a chapter collection into a book ( i.e. a HTML document or a Word document or a )

About

My name is Andrei Ignat .

This software is open source and you can download from https://github.com/ignatandrei/makeBook

How the help manual it was created

Of course the help manual was created using this software. What is better than dogfooding ?

If you want to edit, please go to https://github.com/ignatandrei/makeBook and edit src/help files

You can download this help file as HTML , Word , PDF or EPUB

Installation

Download latest version of the software from github

https://github.com/ignatandrei/makeBook/releases

You will download an executable file - latest is https://github.com/ignatandrei/makeBook/releases/download/v8.2024.822.523/MakeBookCLI.exe

Note for Windows Users : Unblock the software prior to execute it.

Now run

MakeBookCLI i --folder 
MakeBookCLI gmk --folder

The first command will init the structure.

The second one will start to generate output ( html, doc,epub) from the markdown files.

Usage

PDF

If you want the pdf , then you should install a PDF Engine . You could install miktext with

choco install pandoc
choco install rsvg-convert python miktex

Modify in the .bookSettings/bookData.json

"valueNear": ".pandoc/pandoc.exe",
"value": "%LocalAppData%\\Pandoc\\pandoc.exe"

Also modify in .bookSettings/bookData.json the "make an pdf with miktext" value

"enabled":true,
"redirectOutput":false

Close the app ( and the console that you are using )and restart the application .

Folders

There are 4 folders into the project: .output , .bookSettings, .pandoc , book

{
    "book":{
        "title":"The book title",
        "author":"Your name"
    },
    "locations": [
    {
      "name": "pandoc",
      "value": ".pandoc/pandoc.exe",
      "valueIfChocoInstalled": "%LocalAppData%\\Pandoc\\pandoc.exe"
    }

  ],
    "commands": [
      {
        "name": "make a html",
        "value": "-d .settings/pandocHTML.yaml --resource-path book --metadata=title:\"{title}\" --metadata=author:\"{author}\" --title \"{title}\" -o .output/index.html",
        "enabled":true
      },      
    ]
}