Target Audience

Writing in text is more complicated than just spinning up Microsoft Word and trowing down words.

Separation of Content and Display

When I talk about writing in text files, the part that has given others the most trouble is the separation of content (the words themselves) and the presentation (stylesheets, page formatting, and title pages). Instead of having one program that does everything, you use a suite of tools to transform the chapters into something useful.

In coding, this can be seen as the Model View Controller approach where the “model” are the words, the view are EPUB and PDF files, and the “controller” are the tools to convert one into the other.

But that separation requires faith that it will work out in the end and letting something go until later. While my father was writing his memoirs, he could never separate the two and spent hours tweaking image locations only to add another paragraph and have to format again.

Tools

Working with text files means there isn't a single program that does everything such as Scrivner, which I recommend for those authors who move beyond Microsoft Word or LibreOffice but aren't quite ready to switch to text files. Instead, a variety of tools (many of them command line) are cobbled together to write.

There are ways of glossing over many of these low-level tools but there will always be an undercurrent of those raw functions even when wrapped in a fancy environment or behind a build script.

Overall, this means that the target audience needs to have some familiarity with the command line and installing programs but these pages will go through using those tools after that.

Environment

The bulk of the examples are going to be using Linux because that is the environment I use for writing. Many of these steps can be used with Microsoft Windows and macOS. I will attempt to verify it works with Windows, but I don't have and will not use a Mac unless I'm forced to.

🛈 That said, if someone does want to flesh out the other environments, I'm open to including them.