Penny - Flexible E-Book Generation

Penny is an experimental, flexible, multi-format (source and destination) e-book generator.

Requirements

• Ruby 1.9.2+ (uses lots of Ruby 1.9 specific stuff so don't even try with 1.8 :-))
• eeepub (for EPUB generation)
• kramdown

Bundler will install the gems for you, if you like.

Install

gem install penny
bundle

Explanation

Penny is currently tailored for taking multiple files written in Markdown and turning them into various forms of HTML export for passing to PDF, ePub, Mobi and various other generators, but has been created in a modular fashion to make it easy to add more options later.

As of time of writing, Penny is HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL and I do not recommend its use by third parties, unless they are both brave, ready to deal with Penny's shortcomings, and not expecting any support. I will, of course, answer all reasonable questions though :-)

Usage

This is only to give an illustration. Some proper usage info will come in time:

require 'penny'

# Define a book
book = Penny::Book.new do
  title         "My Awesome Book"
  author        "Peter Cooper"
  email         "[email protected]"
  tagline       "Waka waka waka"
  frontcover    "misc/cover.jpg"
  backcover     "misc/backcover.jpg"

  contents do
    frontmatter do
      page name: 'innertitle', types: 'titlepage right'
      page name: 'imprint', types: 'left imprint'
      chapter name: 'acknowledgements'
      chapter name: 'preface'
    end

    chapters do
      part title: "The Good Stuff" do
        chapter name: 'this'
        chapter name: 'that'
        chapter name: 'theother'
      end

      part title: "The Bad Stuff" do
        chapter name: 'thebad'
        chapter name: 'theugly'
      end
    end

    appendix do
      chapter name: 'resources'
    end
  end
end

# Build a book with the HTML builder then do extra stuff like render a SASS
# file and render a PDF using Prince (just use backticks and call your own
# stuff if you want to do other things..)

  book.build(Penny::HTML) do
    sass              
    render_pdf        
  end

# Build a different variant using a different final HTML template (template.variant.html)
# that uses an extra CSS file to tweak settings. We copy this over with copy_assets
# in this case.

  book.build(Penny::HTML, variant: 'landscape') do
    sass
    copy_assets("*.css")                        
    render_pdf                              
  end

# Generate an EPUB
# (behind the scenes this generates an HTML version of variant 'epub' and then processes
# the output and builds an EPUB file with EeePub)

  book.build(Penny::EPUB)

# Ugly example included for completeness
# I no longer create .mobi or .epub files this way but it shows how you can "finish the job"
# using other apps you have installed such as Amazon's 'kindlegen'
# This makes extremely customized workflows possible

  book.build(Penny::HTML, variant: 'kindle') do |b|
    `/Users/peter/Misc/kindlegen/kindlegen tmp/#{b.safe_title}.html -o #{b.safe_title}.mobi`
    `cp tmp/#{b.safe_title}.mobi #{PKG_DIR}`

    # 'ebook-convert' is a part of the popular cross-platform Calibre e-book reader/converter
    `ebook-convert pkg/#{b.safe_title}.mobi #{PKG_DIR}/#{b.safe_title}.epub`
  end                                 

Tests

There are tests and they run nicely with "rake test". Coverage isn't 100% yet but some key structural snafus are covered. E-book building is really a process that would benefit from integration tests and that's on my TODO.

License

MIT license. Copyright (c) 2010 Peter Cooper.