Apocalism.js

Automate your short story build process

What is this?

This is an app I've been working on to compile my illustrated short stories. This is a very early version with a number of problems but I've already used it in production - the results can be seen at http://apocalism.co.uk.

It is essentially a beefed-up opinionated Markdown to HTML to PDF generator with pagination, image management and custom styling capabilities. You supply a Markdown file and high-res images and you get a print-ready PDF, bleeds and everything. You can also build an HTML-only paginated version if you want, too.

apocalism.js built on NodeJS and uses PhantomJS internally to render PDFs.

Who is this for?

It is meant for self publishing writers who:

• want to work on the content and style of their writing at the same time (but within separate files)
• want an unobtrusive writing format (Markdown with a few extra bits and bobs)
• want a styling method that is powerful, popular and easy to pick up (Sass/CSS)
• want to work in a text editor of their choice
• are comfortable working with a command line interface

(At least one of those is known to exist at the time of writing.)

Requirements

• NodeJS (tested on v0.10.22)
• pdftk
• graphicsmagick
• pdfinfo (for local tests only - your distro might have this already)

Installation

npm install -g apocalism-js

Usage

Check out the example in example/. Run the example by doing either make example or, if you've installed using npm -g use apocalism example/example.md.

Loads of useful info in the wiki.

But... why?

I've written up a blog post about how and why I wrote this tool.