A little way back I posted a lengthy article on how to create a e-book using ePub, the static website compiler nanoc and some quick and dirty code. In this much shorter post I'll aim to clean up the solution a little.

nanoc meta-data

One of the nice things about nanoc is the capacity to add arbitrary meta-data to each page. In the original version of the e-book I used a convention based on the URL and nanoc identifier to link from one page to the next: page '/001/' precedes page '/002/' and so forth. It was crufty and required more gsubbing than was sound.

A cleaner approach is to put the data directly inside the page, within nanoc's meta-data block:

--- title: Epithelium chapter: 1 page: 1 --- ... page goes here ...

There are certain pages that I want to exclude from the ePub version (e.g. the website home page). Again, using meta-data the ePub compiler can directed to ignore specific content:

--- title: Home exclude_from_epub: true ---

Using the preprocessor

Another useful feature in nanoc is the preprocess directive you can add to the /Rules file. Using this I can build an outline of the e-book from meta-data and hive it off to a .yaml for other parts of the code to use later.

preprocess do outline = {} @items.each do |item| unless item[:exclude_from_epub] chapter = item[:chapter] page = item[:page] title = item[:title] if chapter outline[chapter] = {} unless outline[chapter] outline[chapter][page] = { :label => item[:title], :file => item.identifier.gsub(/^\/|\/$/, '') + '.html' } end end end File.open("tmp/outline.yaml", "w") {|file| file.write outline.to_yaml } end

The full code for the e-book can be found on Github.

Five more pages have been added to both the web and ePub versions of the book and are available online. I'll be releasing more on a regular basis, so if you're interested in following the book's progress feel free to follow me on Twitter or look for the hashtag #thispurpleworld.

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