md-book-with-docraptor

A node.js app to convert markdown files to a single webpage as well as two PDFs (content and cover) using DocRaptor.

Install

Create a directory and navigate to it:

mkdir md-book-with-docraptor
cd md-book-with-docraptor

Download this repository to the new created directory:

git clone https://github.com/stebrech/md-book-with-docraptor .

Install all the dependencies using your favorite package manager:

npm install

yarn

Markdown Files

Add your markdown files within the src folder. The name of the files are not used in the output but need to be named to represent the correct order. Therefore you could name the files chapter01.md, chapter02.md and so on.

Headings

The book title uses a heading 1 and the subtitle a paragraph tag. Each markdown file will be put in a section tag. For semantic reasons and because of the default styles you should begin each markdown file with a heading 2 and use it only once for each chapter.

Manual page break

The horizontal rule element (<hr>; markdown syntax ***) is “misused” to create a manual page or column break. It is set to not visible either for screen and print.

Metadata

We need some overall metadata which is placed in a json file called metadata.json as well directly in the src folder.

The following keys are excpected:

{
  "title": "md-book-with-docraptor",
  "subtitle": "A node.js app to convert markdown to PDF using Docraptor",
  "imprint": [
    { "label": "Text", "value": "Stefan Brechbühl" },
    { "label": "Images", "value": "Screenshots" },
    {
      "label": "Process",
      "value": "Markdown → HTML → PDF"
    },
    {
      "label": "Print",
      "value": "Name of the printing company"
    },
    {
      "label": "Website",
      "value": "<a href='https://stebre.ch'>stebre.ch</a>"
    }
  ],
  "cover_img": "assets/images/cover.png",
  "imprint_img": "assets/images/cover-photo.png",
  "excerpt": "The excerpt is a short description of the book. It is used on the back cover and as meta description."
}

DocRaptor Key

I recommend to put the value of the user_credentials not directly into docraptor.js. You should do the following:

If you not already opened a DocRaptor account, let’s do that.
Copy your API key.
Add a new file called .env into your root folder.
Write DOCRAPTOR_KEY= and then paste your API key.
Save the file.

Use the scripts

There are two scripts in this repository:

md2html.js creates a html of the content and the cover. Of both there will be an additional version which includes the assets (styles, images) inline.
docraptor.js sends two requests to Docraptor. One with content-inline.html, the other with cover-inline.html.

To run the scripts you need to write

npm html / yarn html or
npm pdf / yarn pdf

in the terminal.

If you want to run both with one command, use:

npm start

yarn start

Turn of test mode of DocRaptor

If you are happy with the results and want to turn of the test mode, you need to change the value of test on line 28 in docraptor.js into false.

Adjust the styles

Within the general.css file, there are some css variables you can modify or adjust the styles elswhere to fit your needs.

Full page images

The print styles make all images in the book to be placed on a separate page.

Known Issues

The cover pdf includes a second blank page
To create a PDF/X compliant pdf, the output intent must be set. You can configure that in Prince (see https://www.princexml.com/doc/graphics/#color-management-and-pdf-profiles), but with DocRaptor you would need to make the ICC profile online available. The DocRaptor support got a feature request from me about providing the most popular output intents.

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