
Publishing Simple Books with Jekyll - bradley_taunt
https://bradleytaunt.com/2019/06/20/publish-with-jekyll/
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readbeard
You might also check out Pollen [0], a publishing system written in Racket.
The creator of Pollen, Matthew Butterick, uses it to produce his own digital
books—including the outstanding Practical Typography [1].

[0] [https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/](https://docs.racket-
lang.org/pollen/) [1]
[https://practicaltypography.com](https://practicaltypography.com)

Edit: I see after a quick search that Pollen has already been featured on HN
multiple times [2] [3], but I still think it might be helpful to reference it
again here.

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20027116](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20027116)
[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15335010](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15335010)

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cosmic_quanta
This is an interesting use of static site generators.

If you are interested in the (Markdown content -> publishable format)
pipeline, take a look at Pandoc. Ultimately this is more developer-oriented
however.

~~~
Tarq0n
[https://bookdown.org/](https://bookdown.org/) is an r implementation of this
toolchain that's been used to make some great looking books.

~~~
suyash
I've been looking to write an interactive book - think of Apple Books but in
HTML and this tool seems to do the job, only thing is that I don't know any R.

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nurettin
I tried something similar to this the first time I heard of wkhtmltopdf some
seven or eight years ago using css to emulate an A4 size box. (it was meant as
a replacement for mssql reporting server)

First, 40 page reports experienced a few millimeters of sliding. It became
more apparent at 60 pages.

Second, I could not go above 75 dpi.

~~~
dsr_
pandoc is usually the solution.

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jdsampayo
One more "cons" can be hyphens, for a comfortable reading a book is normally
justified text with hyphenation. Not sure if wkhtmltopdf will respect that

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miguelmota
Gitbook is another good tool for generating e-book formats (PDF, epub, mobi)
from markdown. I’ve used it for a guide book and it’s been good.

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jtbayly
While I would love to see a decent Jekyll workflow to work with books, this is
not it.

The output looks nice enough, but there aren't even _links_ from the table of
contents to the chapters. Neither in the HTML nor the PDF version. Nor does it
say what page number to find the chapter on in the PDF.

Additionally, as mentioned in the "cons" section of the article, "Chapters are
spit out as one long, single page." This includes the PDF, where there aren't
even page breaks at the start of new chapters.

This is no way to publish a book. Even a simple one.

Does anybody have a Jekyll theme or workflow that actually works well with
books?

~~~
geraldbauer
Good points. I'm the author of the simple book theme. For more book theme
alternatives see the
[https://github.com/bookdesigns](https://github.com/bookdesigns) repo that
includes a jekyll copy of the "famous" (old/classic) gitbook style (see
[http://bookdesigns.github.io/book-git](http://bookdesigns.github.io/book-git)
). Another project I started a while ago is called octobook that lets you -
surprise, surprise - use jekyll for (online) books, see
[https://github.com/octobook](https://github.com/octobook) and
[https://github.com/geraldb/talks/blob/master/octobook.md](https://github.com/geraldb/talks/blob/master/octobook.md)
Anyways, you're right all book themes still a work-in-progress.

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philistine
I have published two books so far using the most obscene of methods; I parse
my own HTML into XeTeX using a mix of bash and Python.

Parsing HTML is supposedly a big no-no but what’s the problem when it’s your
own code?

Anyway, it seems like most comment here are trying to reinvent the wheel when
any variant of LaTeX is a great solution; there are never any compromises to
be made with TeX.

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sgallant
Great article

