arthurgeek-kitabu

Kitabu

• http://github.com/fnando/kitabu

DESCRIPTION:

A framework for creating e-books from Markdown/Textile text markup using Ruby. Using the Prince PDF generator, you'll be able to get high quality PDFs. Mac users that have Textmate installed can have source code highlighted with his/her favorite theme.

While Prince is too expensive (495USD for a single user license), the free version available at http://www.princexml.com/download/ generates a PDF with a small logo on the first page, which is removed when sent to a printer.

FEATURES:

• Write PDF using Markdown or Textile text markup
• Book layout support
• Syntax highlight theme based on Textmate
• Generate a PDF with a single rake task
• Table of Contents automatically generated from chapter titles

SYNOPSIS:

Create a new book with kitabu mybook. Kitabu has support for book layout and syntax highlight theme. You can specify other settings:

kitabu mybook --theme=mac_classic
kitabu mybook --layout=boom

You can check available layouts and themes with kitabu --help

The kitabu command creates a directory "mybook" with the following structure:

• book
  • config.yml
  • images
  • output
  • Rakefile
  • templates
    • layout.css
    • layout.html
    • syntax.css
    • user.css
  • text

The config.yml file holds some information about your book; so you'll always change it. This is the default generated file:

title: [Your Book Title]
copyright: Copyright (c) 2008 [Your Name], All Rights Reserved
authors:
  - [Your Name]
  - [Other Name]
subject: [Write down what your book is about]
keywords: [The keywords related to your book]
theme: eiffel

If you're writing on a different language, the user.css file can override all the messages added by the layout.css. Examples on doing this coming soon.

Now it's time to write your book. All your book content will be placed on the text directory. Kitabu requires you to separate your book into chapters. A chapter is nothing but a directory that holds lots of Markdown/Textile files. The book will be generated using every folder/file alphabetically. So be sure to use a sequential numbering as the name. Here's a sample:

• text
  • 01_Introduction
    • 01_introduction.markdown
  • 02_What_is_Ruby_on_Rails
    • 01_MVC.markdown
    • 02_DRY.markdown
    • 03_Convention_Over_Configuration.markdown
  • 03_Installing_Ruby_on_Rails
    • 01_Installing.textile
    • 02_Mac_OS_X_instructions.textile
    • 03_Windows_instructions.markdown
    • 04_Ubuntu_Linux_instructions.markdown

Note that you can use Textile or Markdown at the same time. Just use the .markdown or .textile file extension.

You'll want to see your progress eventually; it's time for you to generate the book PDF. Just run the command rake kitabu:pdf and your book will be created on the output directory.

There are other rake tasks you can use:

• kitabu:html - generate a html from your content
• kitabu:syntaxes - list all available syntaxes
• kitabu:themes - list all available themes
• kitabu:titles - list all titles and its permalinks
• kitabu:watch - watch text for any change and automatically generate html

Kitabu can generate a Table of Contents (TOC) based on your h2-h6 tags. The h1 tag is discarded because it's meant to be the book title.

If you need to link to a specific chapter, you can use the kitabu:titles rake task to know what's the permalink that you need. For example, a title Installing Mac OS X will have a permalink installing-mac-os-x and you can link to this chapter by writing "See more on Installing Mac OS X":#installing-mac-os-x when using Textile.

To generate the TOC, you need to print a variable called toc, using the eRb tag <%= toc %>.

Syntax Highlighting (Mac OS X)

If you're using Textile, all you need to do is use the tag syntax.. For example, to highlight a code added right into your text, just do something like

syntax(ruby_on_rails). class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  validates_presence_of :login, :password, :email
__
  validates_uniqueness_of :login, :email
end

To keep multiple line breaks into a single code block, add a line __; Kitabu will replace it when generating the HTML file.

If you want to highlight a file, you need to place it into the code directory and call it like this:

syntax(ruby_on_rails). some_file.rb

You can specify the lines you want to highlight; the example below will highlight lines 10-17 from some_file.rb.

syntax(ruby_on_rails 10,17). some_file.rb

You can also specify named blocks to highlight. Named blocks are identified by #begin and #end marks. If some_file.rb has the following code

require "rubygems"
require "hpricot"
require "open"

# begin: get_all_h2_tags
doc = Hpricot(open('http://simplesideias.com.br'))
(doc/"h2").each {|h2| puts h2.inner_text }
# end: get_all_h2_tags

you can get the code between get_all_h2_tags using

syntax(ruby#get_all_h2_tags). some_file.rb

Note: Makdown uses the same syntax above. You just need to indent your code (as usual) and add the syntax. thing as the first line.

INSTALL:

sudo gem install fnando-kitabu --source http://gems.github.com

or, if you have problem

git clone git://github.com/fnando/kitabu.git
cd kitabu
gem build kitabu.gemspec
sudo gem install kitabu

If you're a Mac user and have Textmate installed, you can generate HTML from your source code with syntax highlight, the same way you see in Textmate. First, you need to install Oniguruma regular expression library that can be found at http://www.geocities.jp/kosako3/oniguruma/

Then, you need to install the Ultraviolet gem.

sudo gem install ultraviolet

REFERENCES:

• Textile: http://hobix.com/textile/
• Markdown: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

MAINTAINER

• Nando Vieira (http://simplesideias.com.br)

CONTRIBUTORS

• Arthur Zapparoli (http://arthurgeek.net)

LICENSE:

(The MIT License)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.