Crowbook

Render a book written in markdown to HTML, EPUB and/or PDF.

Crowbook's purpose is to allow you to automatically generate multiple output formats from a book written in Markdown. Its focus is novels, and the default settings should (hopefully) generate readable books with correct typography without requiring you to worry about it.

Example

To see what Crowbook's output looks like, you can read the Crowbook guide rendered in HTML, PDF or EPUB.

You can also play with the online demo version.

Installing

There are two ways to install Crowbook:

Binaries

See the releases page 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.

If you are on Debian GNU/Linux or Ubuntu (on a PC architecture), you can also download .deb packages on the releases page.

Using Cargo

Cargo is the Rust's package manager. You can install it here. Once it is done:

$ cargo install crowbook

will automatically download the latest crowbook release on crates.io, compile it, and install it on your system.

Dependencies

While there should be, strictly speaking, no real dependencies to be able to run Crowbook (it is published as a statically compiled binary), some features require additional commands to work correctly:

• EPUB rendering requires the zip command to be present on your system;
• PDF rendering requires a working installation of LaTeX (preferably xelatex).

Quick tour

The simplest command is:

$ crowbook <BOOK>

where BOOK is a configuration file. Crowbook will parse this file and generate a book in HTML, EPUB, and/or PDF, according to the settings in the configuration file.

To create a new book, assuming you have a list of Markdown files, you can generate a template configuration file with the --create argument:

$ crowbook my.book --create 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.

For short books containing only a single Markdown file, it is possible to embed some metadata at the beginning of the file and use the --single or -s option to run crowbook directly on this Markdown file and avoid creating a separate book configuration file:

$ crowbook -s text.md

For more information see the chapters on the arguments supported by crowbook and on the configuration file.

Current features

Output formats

Crowbook supports HTML, PDF and EPUB (either version 2 or 3) as output formats. See the Crowbook User Guide rendered in HTML, EPUB and PDF.

Input format

Crowbook uses 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 ODT).

Typographic "cleaning"

Maybe the most specific "feature" of Crowbook is that (by default, it can be deactivated) it tries to "clean" the input files. By default, it removes superfluous spaces and tries to use curly quotes. If the book's language is set to french, it also tries its best to respect french typography by replacing spaces with non-breaking ones when it is appropriate (e.g. before '?', '!', ';' or ':').

Please open an issue describing typographic rules if you want it to be implemented for other 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:

---
author: Me
title: My title
---

This is mostly useful when Crowbook is run with the --single argument (receiving a single Markdown file instead of a book configuration file), for short texts that only contain one "chapter".

Proofreading

Crowbook can also generate "proofreading" copies in HTML or PDF, highlighting grammar errors and repetitions.

This feature has been introduced in version 0.9.1 and is still experimental. For more information, see the proofreading chapter of the guide.

Bugs

See the github's issue tracker.

Contributors

• Stéphane Mourey <s+crowbook AT stephanemourey DOT fr>

Acknowledgements

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

• pulldown-cmark
• yaml-rust
• mustache
• clap
• chrono
• uuid
• mime_guess
• crossbeam
• walkdir
• rustc-serialize
• caribon
• hyper
• url
• lazy_static
• regex
• term
• numerals

It also embeds Highlight.js in HTML output to enable syntax highlighting for code blocks.

It also uses configuration files from rust-everywhere to use Travis and Appveyor to generate binaries for various platforms on each release.

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

Also, the W3C HTML validator and the IDPF EPUB validator proved very useful during development.

ChangeLog

See ChangeLog.

Contributing

See how you can contribute to Crowbook.

Library

While the main purpose of Crowbook is to be run as a standalone program, 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 on docs.rs.

Note that, in order to facilitate code reuse, some features have been split to separate libraries:

• crowbook-text-processing contains all the "typographic" functions (smart quotes, handling of non-breaking spaces in french, ...).
• crowbook-intl is used for the internationalization (translation) process.

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 for more information.

Crowbook's logo is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, based on the Rust logo by Mozilla Corporation.

Crowbook includes binary (minified) CSS and Javascript files from Highlight.js, written by Ivan Sagalaev, licensed under the following terms:

Copyright (c) 2006, Ivan Sagalaev

All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

• Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
• Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
• Neither the name of highlight.js nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE REGENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE REGENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.