I'm writing my first book at the moment. Lately I've been doing all my writing in Markdown, but ultimately i'll need an alternative format. For word processing, such as it is, I tend to use Open Office - so really I wanted to be able to write in Markdown, but convert to Open Office (or indeed, any of a variety of formats). For one thing, it's nice to get an idea of the number of pages, which my Markown editor just can't do. Also, I prefer to work with separate files for each chapter - but I'm not entirely sure what order the chapters will end up in. So, what I really wanted was a quick way to do two things - concatenate all my chapters, and then convert the lot to Open Office format.
My solution to this is in two parts.
First, a shell script to concatenate the files. It's important it's fairly easy to rearrange chapters, so the format of this was crucial.
Second, the conversion. For this I turned to Pandoc, a small command-line utility which supports a huge raft of formats including Open Office, Markdown, Microsoft Word, HTML, ePub, LaTeX and so on.
So without further ado, here's my shell script. Easy to reorganise, and does everything I need in minutes.
cat a_chapter_about_rabbits.md \
a_chapter_about_giraffes.md \
all_about_ocelots.md \
lets_talk_about_elephants.md \
wrapping_up.md \
> concatenated.md
pandoc concatenated.md -o book.odt
rm concatenated.md
Now, when I add a new chapter I simply need to pop the filename in the appropriate place, I can see the chapter listing clearly, and rearranging is a basic cut & paste job. Simple!
(Note: the book's not really about ocelots.)