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I'm the creator of this project.

Ukraine, is being invaded by the Russian Federation, right now. Russia is hitting target all over the country by ballistic missiles.

Ukrainian National Bank opened an account to Raise Funds for Ukraine’s Armed Forces:
SWIFT Code NBU: NBUA UA UX
JP MORGAN CHASE BANK, New York
SWIFT Code: CHASUS33
Account: 400807238
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You can also donate to charity supporting Ukrainian army.

THANK YOU!

NB: I wrote a vscode extension that does the same thing this script does, but a bit more polished.

https://github.com/TheFern2/vscode-gutenberg

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=TheFern.vscode-gutenberg

Exporting a markdown book to PDF with Pandoc

I have been wanting to write a book for some time now. I've accumulated lots of experience both in my career as automation and controls engineer, and on my own I have learned tons in software engineering, game dev, etc, the list is huge.

All this stuff rattling in my head needs to come out at some point, at my job and for my personal projects I tend to document very well and that has pushed me to get better at writing.

I have decided to write maybe a few books in markdown, well we'll see how the first one goes.

Setup

The markdown editor that you use makes no difference, I use Typora. If you are not sure vscode has pretty good support for markdown files, and most text editors do. @awwsmm did a great write up on markdown editors state-of-markdown-editors-2019

In addition to that, I use Pandoc, you'll need LaTeX to print PDFs, make sure to follow the instructions.

Debian (Ubuntu)

Extra info: https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-latex-on-ubuntu-20-04-focal-fossa-linux

sudo apt install pandoc

If you prefer latest binary then head over to releases: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases/

To export to pdf you need pdflatex which is in the below package:

sudo apt install texlive-latex-base

Follow this gists for full installation + fonts: https://gist.github.com/rain1024/98dd5e2c6c8c28f9ea9d

For Latex, I am using MiKTeX: https://miktex.org/download

This is a lot of experimentation, I had to switch to xelatex engine. When the python script is ran, you'll get a popup for MiKTeX as is trying to install required packages, and there are a lot. I recomment unchecking the checkbox, or it wil be a tons of clicking to accept hundreds of small packages.

Exporting to PDF

NB: The script relies on the numbering of the folders, and markdown files. Ensure you add a sequential numbers to chapter folders, and md files within the chapters. If you don't have chapter folders, then ensure your md files have sequential numbers. Folders and md files can be named anything.

I structured my chapters in directories, like shown below:

├── book
│   ├── Chapter1
│   │   ├── Scene1.md
│   │   └── Scene2.md
│   └── Chapter2
│       └── Scene1.md
├── images
│   └── lostbook.jpg
└── title.txt

New addition to the export_book.py script, now it supports md files without chapter directories:

├── book_2
│   ├── Scene1.md
│   ├── Scene2.md
│   └── Scene3.md
├── images
│   └── lostbook.jpg
└── title.txt

The title is like a header for pandoc:

---
title: Book Example
author: Fernando B.
rights: Nah
language: en-US
---

Pandoc Resources

The below command will add table of contents, output to book.pdf, get title info from title.txt and grab three markdown files.

pandoc --toc -o book.pdf title.txt .\book\Chapter1\Scene1.md .\book\Chapter1\Scene2.md .\book\Chapter2\Scene1.md

Going beyond the command line

As you can imagine as your book grows, things will get harder to compile. I couldn't find a library or an easy parameter that takes a list of md files in a directory so I wrote a python script export_book.py.

NB: Before you try export_book.py there's a simple command you can use, if you have a single directory with markdown files, the caveat is that all files need to be in a single directory. Chances are if you're writing a book, you're using multiple directories structure:

pandoc --toc ./book/*.md -o book.pdf

The script supports a few arguments:

usage: export_book.py [-h] -p ROOT_PATH [-c] [-f FILE_EXTENSION]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -p ROOT_PATH, --root-path ROOT_PATH
                        Root path for book files
  -c, --using-chapter-folders
                        Are you using folders for chapters?
  -f FILE_EXTENSION, --file-extension FILE_EXTENSION

Examples:

python3 export_book.py -p /path/to/book
python3 export_book.py -p /path/to/book -c
python3 export_book.py -p /path/to/book -f rst

NB: Other file extensions other than md, markdown, have not been tested proceed with caution. If it works let me know.

Other items to think about

I need to experiment with css for formatting the book a bit better and adding header and footer, and so on, but this is a good start for anyone trying to accomplish the same or even writing academic papers as pandoc can output to different formats.

TheFern2/markdown-book