Crowbook ======== [![Build Status](https://travis-ci.org/lise-henry/crowbook.svg?branch=master)](https://travis-ci.org/lise-henry/crowbook) Render a markdown book in HTML, Epub or PDF. Crowbook's purpose is to allow you to automatically generate multiple outputs formats from a book written in Markdown. Its main focus is novels, and the default settings should (hopefully) generate readable books with correct typography. Example ------- To see what Crowbook's output looks like, you can read (a not-necessarily up-to-date version of) the Crowbook guide (containing this README.md file and additional documentation) rendered in [HTML](http://lise-henry.github.io/crowbook/book.html), [PDF](http://lise-henry.github.io/crowbook/book.pdf) or [EPUB](http://lise-henry.github.io/crowbook/book.epub). Installing ---------- ### Packages ### If you are on Debian GNU/Linux or Ubuntu (on a PC architecture), you can download `.deb` packages on [the releases page](https://github.com/lise-henry/crowbook/releases). ### Binaries ### See [the releases page](https://github.com/lise-henry/crowbook/releases) to download a precompiled binary for your architecture (currently: Linux, Windows and MacOSX). Just extract the archive and run `crowbook` (or `crowbook.exe` on Windows). You might also want to copy the binary somewhere in your `PATH` for later usage. ### Building ### You'll need to have the [Rust](https://www.rust-lang.org/) compiler on your machine first; you can [download and install it here](https://www.rust-lang.org/downloads.html). Once it is down: ``` $ cargo install crowbook ``` will automatically download the latest `crowbook` release on [crates.io](https://crates.io/crates/crowbook) and install it. Usage ----- The simplest command is: ```bash $ crowbook ``` where `BOOK` is a configuration file. Crowbook will parse this file and generate a book in HTML, Epub, LaTeX, and/or PDF, according to the settings in the configuration file. So if you clone this repository and run ```bash $ crowbook config.book ``` you'll generate the example book in various formats. The HTML version should look [like that](http://lise-henry.github.io/crowbook/book.html). To create a new book, assuming you have a list of Markdown files, you can generate a template configuration file with the `--create` argument: ```bash $ crowbook --create my.book chapter_*.md ``` This will generate a default `my.book` file, which you'll need to complete. This configuration file contains some metadata, options, and lists the Markdown files. Here is a basic example: ``` author: Joan Doe title: Some book lang: en output_html: some_book.html + chapter_1.md + chapter_2.md + chapter_3.md + ... ``` For more information see [the configuration file](book_example/config.md). It is also possible to give additional parameters to `crowbook`; we have already seen `--create`, but if you want the full list, see [the arguments](book_example/arguments.md). Current features ---------------- ### Output formats ### Crowbook (to my knowledge) correctly supports HTML and EPUB (either version 2 or 3) as output formats: rendered files should pass respectively the [W3C validator](https://validator.w3.org/) and the [IDPF EPUB validator](http://validator.idpf.org/) for a wide range of (correctly Markdown formatted) input files. See the example book rendered in [HTML](http://lise-henry.github.io/crowbook/book.html) and [EPUB](http://lise-henry.github.io/crowbook/book.epub) on github.io. LaTeX output is a bit more tricky: it should work reasonably well for novels (the primary target of Crowbook), but `pdflatex` might occasionally choke on some "weird" unicode character. Moreover, images are not yet implemented (but should come soon). See the example book rendered in [PDF](http://lise-henry.github.io/crowbook/book.pdf) on github.io. ODT output is experimental at best. It might work if your inputs files only include very basic formatting (basically, headers, emphasis and bold), it will probably look ugly in the rest of the cases, and it might miserably fail in some. See the example book rendered in [ODT](http://lise-henry.github.io/crowbook/book.odt) on github.io if you want to hurt your eyes. ### Input format ### Crowbook uses [pulldown-cmark](https://crates.io/crates/pulldown-cmark) and thus should support most of CommonMark Markdown. Inline HTML, however, is not implemented, and probably won't be, as the goal is to have books that can also be generated in PDF (and maybe eventually ODT). Maybe the most specific "feature" of Crowbook is that (by default, it can be deactivated) it tries to "clean" the input files. By default this doesn't do much (except removing superfluous spaces), but if the book's language is set to french it tries to respect french typography, replacing spaces with non-breaking ones when it is appropriate (e.g. in french you are supposed to put a non-breaking space before '?', '!', ';' or ':'). This feature is relatively limited at the moment, but I might try to add more options and support for more languages. ### Links handling ### Crowbook tries to correctly translate local links in the input Markdown files: e.g. if you have a link to a markdown file that is part of your book, it will be transformed into a link inside the document. ### Inline YAML blocks ### Crowbook supports inline YAML blocks. These are blocks delimited with lines containing `---` (three dashes). An example of such block: ```markdown --- author: Me title: My title --- ``` These blocks must contain *valid* YAML syntax. If they are not at the beginning of the Markdown file, they must also be preceded by an empty line. It is possible to use inline YAML blocks to modify options for the book (`author` and `title` in the previous example). This is mostly useful when Crowbook is runned with the `--single` argument (receiving a single Markdown file instead of a book configuration file). ### Bugs ### See the [github's issue tracker](https://github.com/lise-henry/crowbook/issues). Acknowledgements ---------------- Besides the [Rust](https://www.rust-lang.org/) compiler and standard library, Crowbook uses the following libraries: * [pulldown-cmark](https://crates.io/crates/pulldown-cmark) (for parsing markdown) * [yaml-rust](https://crates.io/crates/yaml-rust) (for parsing YAML blocks) * [mustache](https://crates.io/crates/mustache) (for templating) * [clap](https://github.com/kbknapp/clap-rs) (for parsing command line arguments) * [chrono](https://crates.io/crates/chrono) (date and time library) * [uuid](https://crates.io/crates/uuid) (to generate uuid) It also uses configuration files from [rust-everywhere](https://github.com/japaric/rust-everywhere) to use [Travis](https://travis-ci.org/) and [Appveyor](http://www.appveyor.com/) to generate binaries for various platforms on each release. While Crowbook directly doesn't use them, there was also inspiration from [Pandoc](http://pandoc.org/) and [mdBook](https://github.com/azerupi/mdBook). Also, the [W3C HTML validator](https://validator.w3.org/) and the [IDPF EPUB validator](http://validator.idpf.org/) proved very useful during development. ChangeLog --------- See [ChangeLog](ChangeLog.md). Library ------- While the main purpose of Crowbook is to be runned as a command line, the code is written as a library, so if you want to build on it you can use it as such. You can look at the generated documentation [here](http://lise-henry.github.io/rust/crowbook/). License ------- Crowbook is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), version 2.1 or (at your option) any ulterior version. See [LICENSE](LICENSE.md) for more information.