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An attempt to build software for composing and compiling novels, something like Scrivener, but using Sublime Text as the IDE and Multimarkdown as the markup language.

Strongly inspired by Scrivener, and this article by Ian Hocking.

It currently runs as a Node.js Grunt task. I've only tested it on windows, but I should think it'll port pretty easily.

To Install;

  • Install Node.js (I wrote this on v0.10.21) if you haven't already got it.
  • Install Multimarkdown
  • Install Calibre ebook publisher
  • Clone this repo.
  • npm install -g grunt-cli to get the grunt task runner, if you haven't already got it.
  • Open a command window in c:\wherever\you\cloned\the\repo\Compiler and run npm install the packages.

To Write the Novel;

Create a folder structure with the following shape;

.
  manuscripts/
     firstDraft/
       01.front matter.mmd
       02.chapter 1.mmd
       02.01 scene 1.mmd
       02.02 scene 2.mmd
       03.chapter 2.mmd
     secondDraft/
       01.chapter 1.mmd
     fragments/

I edit the files in sublime text, where the 'Project' feature can be used to manage your manuscripts. Just add the root folder here to a blank project; this should show the files in the Side Bar, the same way the binder shows the document structure in Scrivener.

Under this structure, though, this allows many different manuscripts. I use this for different drafts, story notes, scraps and fragments, etc.

To Run;

On the command line;

grunt --gruntfile="c:\wherever\you\cloned\the\repo\Compiler\gruntfile.js" --novel="c:\wherever\your\novel\lives" watch

This will start a processor running in the background. Whenever you edit a markdown file, it'll concatenate the files in each subfolder of 'manuscripts' and run it through multimarkdown. You should end up with a structure like this;

.
  manuscripts/
     firstDraft/
       01.front matter.mmd
       02.chapter 1.mmd
       02.01 scene 1.mmd
       02.02 scene 2.mmd
       03.chapter 2.mmd
     secondDraft/
       01.chapter 1.mmd
     fragments/
  out/
    01.working/
     firstDraft.mmd
     secondDraft.mmd
     fragments.mmd
  02.Html/
     firstDraft.html
     secondDraft.html
     fragments.html
  03.Mobi/
     firstDraft.mobi
     secondDraft.mobi
     fragments.mobi
  04.Pdf/
     firstDraft.pdf
     secondDraft.pdf
     fragments.pdf