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 readables book with correct typography.

It is also possible to use crowbook for e.g. technical documentation, but it might not be the best tool for that.

Building and installing

Youl'll need to have the Rust compiler on your machine first; you can download and install it here. Once it is down:

$ cargo install crowbook

will download crowbook and install it.

Usage

The simplest command is:

$ crowbook <BOOK>

Where BOOK is a configuration file. Crowbook will then parse the config file and generate book in HTML, Epub, LaTeX, and/or PDF, according to the setting in the configuration file. So if you clone this repository and run

$ crowbook book_example/config.book

(or cargo run -- book_example/config.book if you don't want to install it), you'll generate the example book in various format. The HTML version should look like that.

Now, let's say you want to make your own book. Assuming you have a list of Markdown files, you can generate a template configuration file with the --create argument:

$ 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 page, or the whole book_example directory. (A (not necessarily up-to-date) rendered version is available in HTML here).

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 page.

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 and the IDPF EPUB validator for a wide range of (correctly Markdown formatted) input files. See the example book rendered in HTML and EPUB on github.io.

LaTeX output is 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, the rendering of code blocks is not satisfactory and images are not yet implemented. See the example book rendered in PDF on github.io to get an idea of the problems you might encounter.

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 on github.io if you want to hurt your eyes.

Input format

Crowbook uses pulldown-cmark and thus should support most of commonmark Markdown. There are, however, a few features that that are not supported:

• Tables and Footnotes are not yet implemented. Tables might be implemented soon, but footnotes are a bit more tricky.
• HTML in markdown is not implemented, and probably won't be, as the goal is to have books that can also be generated in PDF (and maybe ODT).

Maybe the most specific "feature" of Crowbook is that (by default, it can be deactivated) 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.

Table of Contents

Crowbook currently only supports a table of contents for first-level headers (e.g. chapters). There is currently no option to integrate it in the document, so it is only generated in the EPUB format.

See also Bugs.

Acknowledgements

Besides the Rust compiler and standard library, Crowbook uses the following libraries:

• pulldown-cmark (for parsing markdown)
• mustache (for templating)
• clap (for parsing command line arguments)
• chrono (date and time library)
• uuid (to generate uuid)

While Crowbook directly doesn't use them, there was also inspiration from Pandoc and mdBook.

ChangeLog

See ChangeLog.

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. The code is currently badly documented (and badly in a general manner), but you can look at the generated documentation here.

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 file for more information.