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Ask HN: What software can I use, that runs on Mac, to write a book?
I'm writing a book on basic monitoring for DevOps engineers, just for fun really and something for my CV. BookPrintingUK will print from a PDF, I'm aware I could use MarkDown, and I could use LeanPub - but I want a physical book.
Can anyone recommend some software they've used to write a book?
- 100ideas 10y agoTry the gitbook editor by https://www.gitbook.com/ https://www.gitbook.com/, then export as pdf. You can write in markdown or asciidoc, revision content in git/github, export to pdf or ebook, and develop your layout with a custom theme (https://toolchain.gitbook.com/themes/ https://toolchain.gitbook.com/themes/). Asciidoc + custom theme is probably feature-rich enough for you to accomplish whatever content organization + layout you want. Gitbook has some kind of subscription model if you use their site, but the editor is free I believe.
- 100ideas 10y agoO'Reilly Media has shared some of the toolchain they've developed internally to help their book authors create content. https://github.com/oreillymedia/atlas_book_skeleton https://github.com/oreillymedia/atlas_book_skeleton https://github.com/oreillymedia/orm_book_samples https://github.com/oreillymedia/orm_book_samples In particular, you might be interested in the asciidoc_only folder in that second repo. Potentially you could author your book with the same asciidoc structure... then see if O'Reilly wants to publish it.
- oddlyaromatic 10y agoI've heard good things about Scrivener from several authors.