How I Wrote My Book • Hacker News Board

Re: How I Wrote My Book

#21

Post by lifeisstillgood » Tue, Dec 07, 2021, 7:49 AM UTC

lihaoyi wrote: post #14

For my book Hands on Scala, I did a totaly different approach: parsed markdown into HTML myself, used puppeteer to turn it into PDFs. I extended markdown with some macros to do the things I needed (e.g. named cross-references, two-column sections, graphviz diagram blocks, pulling in code snippets from the examples folder) The build tool made it easy to import libraries like CommonMark-Java or ApachePDFBox to do what…

I see that you have a physical copy on sale on amazon KDP - How do you manage getting a pdf into KDP (I understand it is possible just that it is not recommended / renders poorly)?

Re: How I Wrote My Book

#22

Post by kevinmcconnell » Tue, Dec 07, 2021, 8:50 AM UTC

andai wrote: post #4

Thanks for this article, I will come back to it in the future. By the way, the link to the Spell Right extension actually links to the AsciiDoc extension.

> By the way, the link to the Spell Right extension actually links to the AsciiDoc extension.

D'oh! :) Thanks! I've fixed it.

Re: How I Wrote My Book

#23

Post by kevinmcconnell » Tue, Dec 07, 2021, 8:52 AM UTC

adamgordonbell wrote: post #5

I would recommend using Vale for linting prose in a text editor. It can approach grammarly like rules as well as handling spelling for technical documents fairly well. https://github.com/errata-ai/vale

Oh cool, that looks really interesting! I hadn't seen it before, but will definitely try it out. Thanks for sharing.