In the year 2020, I released a book, written with a friend, called "Next Level Taschengeld". We were both tech nerds back then and decided to write the book completely in Markdown with the assistance of Git.

I recently found this project again and wanted to share some lessons about it.

The output

About the book

The word Taschengeld stands for pocket money in German. It is about building sustainable affiliate marketing websites within a niche, where not a lot of competitors exist.

Although I am not behind the topic anymore today, it taught me a lot about writing structure and expressing my thoughts as simply as possible.

Creating a pdf and epub

We wanted to bundle all the markdown files, located in the src directory of the repository, into a single pdf and epub.

For this, I opted for the following tool stack:

• pandoc (converts input formats like markdown to other formats)

• pdflatex (pdfengine to convert pandoc formats to pdf)

• GNU Make (to fixate the pandoc commands for everybdoy)

The final makefile

all: all-before dist/book.epub dist/book.pdf

all-before:
    mkdir -p dist

dist/book.epub: $(wildcard chapters/*) $(wildcard resources/**/*) Makefile
    pandoc --toc --toc-depth=2 -f markdown --css resources/styling.css -o dist/book.epub chapters/* \
           --epub-cover-image=./resources/cover.jpg


dist/book.pdf: $(wildcard chapters/*) $(wildcard resources/**/*) Makefile
    pandoc --toc --toc-depth=2 -f markdown \
           --css resources/styling.css \
           -o dist/book.pdf chapters/* \
           -V papersize=A5 \
           -V documentclass=book \
           -V mainfont="Proxima Nova" \
           -V geometry:margin=0.95in \
           --pdf-engine pdflatex \
           --epub-cover-image=./resources/cover.jpg \
           --highlight-style=monochrome

clean:
    rm -r dist

Bundling this into a GitHub action

The GitHub action is much simpler. It just runs make and looks like this

name: 'Compile'

on: [push]

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    container:
      image: pandoc/latex:2.9.2
      volumes:
        - ./:/data
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Install Make
        run: apk add --no-cache make
      - name: Run Make
        run: make all
      - name: Upload dist
        uses: actions/upload-artifact@v3
        with:
          name: book-dist
          path: dist/

It uses the pandoc/latex container, which ships with everything I need besides make.

To solve the puzzle, I just needed to install make on that container and fire!

With the action actions/upload-artifact the pipeline uploads the generated artifacts to the internal store, where they can be downloaded.

Template repository

Are you planning to step into my footsteps? You can find the repository here and reuse the code.

https://github.com/RoyalZSoftware/the-history-of-sever-side-javascript-book/tree/pandoc-template

Conclusion

The book didn't sell. But it was a great project for learning how to write more structuredly and to learn about pandocs incredible superpowers.

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