The really easiest way to start
Nothing against the "higher-level tools" (
Calibre,
Sigil,
InDesign, …), but the real
best way if you’re a newbie or a novelist is to use
Markdown &
Pandoc and go from there.
Markdown is a simple and readable text format that can be edited with the simplest
text editor, programs like
Ghostwriter,
MarkText or
Obsidian, and novel writing software like
Manuskript or
NovelWriter. It is a perfect start for focusing on content and distraction-free writing.
Pandoc is the
swiss army knife of document conversion. And it makes good basic EPUBs. Plus, you can use your own templates to make it create the most elaborate thing. You can also output your Markdown in any other format, like
HTML,
PDF,
LibreOffice ODT, whatever.
These two make an
ideal combination for single-source publishing. You can always take the generated EPUB and go from there, to something even more fine-tuned.
Using the right keys in the Markdown file’s
YAML header allows seamless integration into Calibre, Sigil and almost any e-reading software you can think of (Foliate, Thorium, hardware e-readers, you name it). Check out things like author, title, subtitle, tags, description all appearing when you import the sample EPUB into Calibre. Just from a few simple keys in the Markdown header.
I have included a short sample,
A Short History of Drabble in Markdown format, and the results Pandoc produced, using all default settings (but you can tweak almost anything).
The commands used to generate these files were:
Code:
pandoc -f commonmark_x -t epub --standalone --toc=true -o 'A Short History of Drabble.epub' 'A Short History of Drabble - YAML.md'
Code:
pandoc -f commonmark_x -t html5 --standalone --toc=true -o 'A Short History of Drabble.html' 'A Short History of Drabble - YAML.md'
Code:
pandoc -f commonmark_x -t pdf --pdf-engine lualatex --standalone --toc=true -o 'A Short History of Drabble.pdf' 'A Short History of Drabble - YAML.md'
I packed everything in a ZIP archive, since ".md" and ".html" can’t be uploaded here.
Have fun trying things out, and happy writing!