book is a simple tool for working with groff mom manuscript files. It provides word counts, either for the entire manuscript, or for each chapter, and allows for publishing either parts of the manuscript or the entire manuscript into either PDF or DOCX formats.
To install, simply clone the repository and run make install,
$ git clone https://github.com/andrewpillar/book
$ cd book/
$ make install
This will install the binary into the GOPATH, ensure this is part of your
PATH so the binary can be invoked.
book can be used for working with pre-existing manuscript files, or for
creating new manuscripts. New manuscripts can be created via the book new
command. This will create a new .mom file and open it up for editing via the
program specified via the EDITOR environment variable. Authorship information
is derived from the git configuration, it is assumed that book will be used
within a git repository.
$ book new "Dracula"
The newly created .mom file will be populated with the given title, copyright
information, and the authorship taken from the git configuration,
$ cat dracula.mom
.DOCTITLE "My Book"
.PRINTSTYLE "TYPESET"
.TITLE DOC_COVER "\*[$DOCTITLE]"
.AUTHOR "Bram Stoker"
.COPYRIGHT DOC_COVER "1897 \*[$AUTHOR]"
.DOC_COVER TITLE AUTHOR COPYRIGHT
.DOCTYPE CHAPTER
.TITLE "\*[$DOCTITLE]"
Information of the manuscript can be viewed via the ls, and wc commands,
which can be used for listing the chapters and providing a word count,
repectively.
$ book ls dracula.mom
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
The -n flag can be given to provide the chapter number, and the -wc flag
can be given to provide the word count for the chapter,
$ book ls -n -wc dracula.mom
1 CHAPTER ONE 5,701
2 CHAPTER TWO 5,475
Word count for the overall manuscript can be retrieved via book wc,
$ book wc dracula.mom
Average chapter word count: 5,588
Manuscript word count: 11,176
A chapter name can be given to get the word count for an individual chapter,
$ book wc dracula.mom "CHAPTER ONE"
5,701
This repository includes an example manuscript to demonstrate the groff mom format which should be used as an addition to the documentation of mom.
Manuscripts can be published into both the PDF and DOCX formats, via the pub
command,
$ book pub -f pdf dracula.mom
dracula.pdf
Individual chapters of a manuscript can be published via passing the chapter names as additional arguments,
$ book pub -f pdf dracula.mom "CHAPTER ONE"
dracula-chapter-1.pdf
Chapter numbers can also be given in lieu of chapter titles,
$ book pub -f pdf dracula.mom 1
dracula-chapter-1.pdf
The pub command will print out the name of the published manuscript as the
only output upon success. If chapters were specified then the name will be
formatted to reflect that. For example,
$ book pub -f pdf dracula.mom 1 2
dracula-chapters-1-to-2.pdf
The PDF format requires groff. If using Linux, then this should already be installed, along with the mom macro set.
To publish in the PDF format, simply specify it via the -f flag with the pub
command,
$ book pub -f pdf dracula.mom
dracula.pdf
Under the hood this runs the following groff command,
$ groff -k -mom -T pdf <file>.mom > <file>.pdf
Pretty much every literary agent expects manuscripts to be submitted in the DOCX
format. To publish in the DOCX format, simply specify it via the -f flag with
the pub command,
$ book pub -f docx dracula.mom
dracula.docx
The manuscript produced in the DOCX format will not have formatting parity with the PDF format. At the bare minimum it will ensure:
- Times New Roman
- Font size 12pt
- Double spaced lines
There are many features available via the groff mom macro set that are not implemented in the DOCX format produced via book. Under the hood this uses the godocx library for producing DOCX files, which itself was inspired by the python-docx library.