Monday, March 28, 2011

"bookshop" - Where Ruby Meets DocBook

We are very excited to announce the early release of "bookshop."

Summary:

bookShop is an open-source Ruby-based framework for DocBook toolchain happiness and sustainable productivity. The framework is optimized to help developers quickly ramp-up, allowing them to more rapidly jump in and develop their DocBook-to-Output flows, by favoring convention over configuration, setting them up with best practices from the get-go.

The Goal:

To go from zero to exporting(pdfs, epub or whatever) from your DocBook source files in under 10 minutes.

Here's the rubygems page: https://rubygems.org/gems/bookshop

And the source code: https://github.com/blueheadpublishing/bookshop

bookshop currently works on Mac OS X, but can also be used on any *nix OS. Windows support is coming in the next couple of weeks.

To install bookshop:
$> sudo gem install bookshop

To create a new bookshop application:
$> bookshop new new_app_name

You can edit your book in the new "book/" subfolder, starting with the book.xml file

To build a pdf format from your DocBook source:
(from within the root of your new_app folder)

$> bookshop build pdf

Your new pdf book will be located in the "build/pdf" subfolder