The Web Book Boilerplate - Writing books for almost every platform

This looks interesting. Is there an example of a book published with this?

We need a demo/example :)

Hmm, besides using pandoc for conversion, how does this break down against Sphinx (<a href="http://sphinx-doc.org" rel="nofollow">http://sphinx-doc.org</a>)?

I'm working on a set of self-published E-books (<a href="http://justthebestparts.com" rel="nofollow">http://justthebestparts.com</a>).<p>Among my goals was to be able to publish to the Web while writing and have the option for public comments. I also wanted to write the books using Markdown or Textile.<p>I ended up writing some tools to convert the generated (X)HTML to epub and mobi, and the results are pretty good. However, I also want to have a PDF version and I've yet to find an automated tool that does a good job. I'm deeply skeptical that any tool can take HTML and output nicely formated PDF with proper page breaks, image handling, no dangling sentences or paragraphs, no distracting rivers of white-space in the text, etc.<p>I'll give this a shot but I'm not sure if there's a better solution than periodically hand-crafting the PDF.

I'm really interested in this, and it would really sell me on using it if there was a demo provided.

Hey, co-founder of Leanpub here.<p>If you're interested in the differences between Pandoc and Leanpub, there are two places to look. Leanpub is based off of Kramdown, so there's the Kramdown documentation[1]. We have made a few extensions to Kramdown to support things that books need, so you'll also want to look at the Leanpub manual[2].<p>If you have any questions, send us an email at hello@leanpub.com.<p>Looks like an exciting project. I'll take a look.<p>[1]: <a href="http://kramdown.rubyforge.org/syntax.html" rel="nofollow">http://kramdown.rubyforge.org/syntax.html</a> [2]: <a href="https://leanpub.com/help/manual" rel="nofollow">https://leanpub.com/help/manual</a>

This may get buried, but I took a stab at creating a first draft of a demo by adapting Scott Chacon's Pro Git to WBB's directory structure.<p>It's not working for all output formats (and images are missing and there's no stylesheet, etc) but I'm hoping to invite collaboration by just throwing it up there:<p><a href="http://github.com/tspike/wbb-demo" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/tspike/wbb-demo</a> for source or <a href="http://tspike.github.com/wbb-demo" rel="nofollow">http://tspike.github.com/wbb-demo</a> for HTML<p>Thanks for making this tool! It's very timely for me.

Lightweight markup languages are not powerful enough to create pdf's suitable for printing.<p>PDF/dead tree is a still a huge platform. Dealing with front/back matter is the 20% end of the solution that no one wants to deal with ;(<p>Disclaimer - I've written multiple ebooks (which are relatively easy, though older kindle/mobi7 has quite a few warts), yet still have big demand for print. I've yet to see one source to rule them all. (Personally use rST and tools around it).

This looks like a product that I could use. I tried installing it - and found it easy enough to install Kindlegen. When I got to the 'npm install' part, I discovered that I had to install Node.js (at least I assume I did). I then tried running it and found that Grunt was not installed. Maybe update the installation instructions.

To me a "Web Book" should take advantage of some HTML5 features in order to get some of the benefits of the richer Kindle/iBooks experience:<p>* Offline in-browser reading using AppCache<p>* Highlighting, bookmarks, notes, last place read using localStorage or indexedDB and then synced to the server when online

I'm currently writing a book. I think it'll take a while til it's online, but I've often thought about a boilerplate where I can just start to write a book and don't have to care about all the other formats.<p>So, no.. unfortunately there's no demo :( Just try it out :)

Question: LeanPub and Pandoc have some differences in markdown. This is because LeanPub uses Kramdown not Pandoc. For example they use different syntax for code highlighting and for defining tables. Does Wbb handle these differences in a portable way?

Thank you very much for your feedback! Much appreciated!

This looks interesting but as others have mentioned, I would also like to see an HTML version in action.<p>I've self published two draft books, one using a custom-rails setup and the other using the Octopress/Jekyll platform (<a href="http://ruby.bastardsbook.com" rel="nofollow">http://ruby.bastardsbook.com</a> and <a href="http://photography.bastardsbook.com" rel="nofollow">http://photography.bastardsbook.com</a>)...but they are only books in name only...However, I think moving them over to Markdown won't be too much of a problem.<p>But my main concern is how to turn a list of markdown files into a decent website without too much hassle. For example, I would like the code snippets to "live" on github (or in an external directory) and pulled only into the page templates where specified by the publishing-script. Octopress handles this pretty nicely with its liquid tags. I haven't worked it out yet but I think it can't be too hard to design a rake task that compiles the Octopress site and delivers the Markdown to leanpub as specified...I'm eagerly waiting for Octopress 2.1 to come out.