What is it about?

Wordsmith is a Ruby framework with a built in command-line toolset to create, share, publish and collaborate on e-books, guides, manuals, etc.

Through the command line interface, you can create a project repository with a standard directory structure that allows you and your co-authors to easily manage your content.

The command line interface provides a set of commands to export in the following formats:

• epub
• mobi
• pdf
• html

You can also publish your book to your github project page with a single command.

By the way, Wordsmith was heavily based on the git-scribe gem, but with a few extra goodies such as painless installation.

Installing

First of all, you should have Pandoc installed in your system.

Next, install the wordsmith ruby gem.

$ gem install wordsmith

Now you're good to go.

Usage

$ wordsmith new [book name]

After that, Wordsmith will create a default directory structure so you just need to start creating your own content without worrying about anything else.

book/
  .wordsmith
  layout/
    header.html
    footer.html
  assets/
    images/
      cover.jpg
    stylesheets/
      master.scss
      _partial.scss
      other.css
      epub.css
  content/
    01_chapter_one.md
    02_chapter_two.md
    03_chapter_three/
      01_lorem.md
      02_ipsum.md
  final/
    book.epub
    book.mobi
    book.pdf
    book/index.html

You can edit your book metadata inside the .wordsmith file:

---
edition:    0.1
language:   en
author:     Your Name; Additional author
title:      Your Book Title
cover:      assets/images/cover.jpg

# Other configuration options
# font:       YOUR_FONT_FAMILY

If you are publishing in a language like Chinese, you should specify a font with Chinese glyphs.

You can specify additional authors by separating them with a ;

The layout directory contains the header and footer for an online version of your book.

The assets directory contains images and stylesheets. Wordsmith has built-in support for Sass.

In the content directory you can:

1. write content as single files

• use directories to easily manage long chapters

Please note that the file names in the 'content' folder must be snake cased and begin with the number of the chapter or section (e.g. 01_chapter_one.md).

To generate your book in different formats:

$ wordsmith generate [html|epub|mobi|pdf| ]
(don't pass any option to generate all formats at once)

Publishing your books

You can also publish a pretty neat html version of your book/manual/guide/etc. in github:

$ wordsmith publish git@github.com:jassa/wordsmith-demo.git

This will be available in a site like http://jassa.github.com/wordsmith-demo/

REMEMBER

Git is an important part of this tool, a typical workflow should look like this:

$ wordsmith new ruby_guide
// this command will also create a git repository
// and the first commit, but IT WILL NOT BE PUSHED YET
// since you haven't provided a remote ref

$ cd ruby_guide
// Here you edit your 'content' directory with your own chapters

// Generate your output files..
$ wordsmith generate

// ..and when you are ready to commit, do it normally:
$ git commit -am "finished chapter one"

// Add a ref to your (newly created) remote repo
$ git add remote origin git@github.com:jassa/wordsmith-demo.git
$ git push origin master

// Note that if you want to publish to github pages,
// you can do this instead:
$ wordsmith publish git@github.com:jassa/wordsmith-demo.git

// This command will create a branch called 'gh-pages' (as github requires),
// just remember that you'll still need to run `git push origin master`
// to push your book editables

License

Wordsmith is released under the MIT License.