Production Notes
If you’re curious about the technology and process used to create this book, I hope the following points go someway towards answering your questions.
Planning And Discussion
This book was crowdsourced from the Voices From Industry community on Google+.
Writing
This book was written in Markdown notation. Markdown is a very light-weight notation, allowing me to focus on the content of the book without being distracted by presentation issues at the writing stage.
The Markdown sources for this book are hosted on GitHub at github.com/stuartherbert/if-i-knew-then/. The toc.json file contains all of the chapters in the right order; the CLI PHP script tools/update-nav.php is used to re-generate the HTML version’s navigation sidebar when necessary. You’re most welcome to send in pull requests to help me improve the book for future editions.
Jekyll was used to convert the Markdown sources into the HTML version of the book. You can run Jekyll locally on your laptop to proof your changes as you make them.
Twitter’s Bootstrap CSS framework was used as the basis for the HTML version’s look and feel.
Publishing
The final HTML version of the book will be published online via GitHub Pages, with the conversion to HTML once again handled by Jekyll.
The Markdown sources will be converted into an intermediate LibreOffice document using pandoc. This intermediate file will then used to create the PDF, Kindle and ePub editions that you can download from the website.
The Kindle edition will be created from the LibreOffice document, using calibre. The formatting will be controlled by applying a pre-prepared stylesheet to the LibreOffice-format document before exporting to HTML format. Proofing will be done using the Kindle app on the iPad and a physical Kindle Paperwhite device.
The ePub edition will be created from the LibreOffice document using calibre, using the same formatting stylesheet developed for the Kindle edition. Proofing will be done using iBooks preview mode on the iPad.
The PDF edition will be created by applying a different pre-prepared stylesheet to the LibreOffice-format document, and then using LibreOffice’s “Save As PDF” option. There will be two PDF editions, one sized for British A4 paper, and the other for US letter paper.
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