6 ms·
I’m halfway through my second novel. Both in very barebones markdown (using pretty much only headings). Plain text is a blessing. I can keep everything in git,
by sicher 6y ago
I’m halfway through my second novel. Both in very barebones markdown (using pretty much only headings). Plain text is a blessing. I can keep everything in git, searching in emacs with swiper is fantastic (and good search is a must as the material grows) and any tool I lack I can hack together.
- em-bee 6y agohow do you convert from markdown to standard manuscript format which is often required for submissions?
- powersnail 6y agopandoc is pretty handy. It's pretty much plain text anyway, whatever format is used.
- jonnycomputer 6y agobut won't get you all the way there, unfortunately, since novel format is pretty specific.
- powersnail 6y agoWhat are some specific requirements? Aren't most formatting done by the publisher anyway?
- em-bee 6y agopublishers format for print, but the submission needs to be in a specific format too. this stems from the days where manuscripts were submitted on paper, and not electronically. one could argue that with electronic submission such format requirements are no longer relevant, but we all know that people don't like change. standard manuscript format looks roughly like this: lines are double spaced first line of each paragraph is indented, but there is no space between paragraphs first page contains contact information and word count. section headers are centered each page (except the first) contains a header with: "authors lastname / story title / page #"
- powersnail 6y agoThese requirements seem to be easily within pandoc’s ability though, as it can use a reference docx file.
- em-bee 6y agoindeed, see my other reply above, linking to an article explaining exactly how that works
- jonnycomputer 6y agoNews to me, but in this case, I'm happy to be wrong.
- em-bee 6y agoyup, and here is how to use pandoc to convert to standard manuscript format: http://www.autodidacts.io/convert-markdown-to-standard-manuscript-format-odts-docs-and-pdfs-with-pandoc/ http://www.autodidacts.io/convert-markdown-to-standard-manus...
- jonnycomputer 6y agothank you for this. huh. looks like i bookmarked this article for followup some time ago, and completely forgot about it.