1. Life after Adobe
Building beautiful ebooks with
open-source tools
Simon Collinson & Nick Barreto
ebookcraft 2018

2. About us
Nick Barreto
● Co-founder, Technology Director, Canelo Digital Publishing
● @nickbarreto
Simon Collinson
● Manager, Content Sales, Rakuten Kobo
(formerly Digital Editor, Canelo)
● @simon_collinson

3. Overview
● The cost of Creative Cloud
● Crimes against #eprdctn
● What do we actually use from Creative Cloud?
● Photoshop replacements
● <aside>Introducing the command line</aside>
● InDesign replacements
● A smattering of LaTeX

4. The cost of Creative Cloud

6. Crimes against
#eprdctn
● Unlinked indexes
● Soft hyphens
● Lost scene breaks
● Glyphs as images
● Div soup
● Span bouillabaisse

7. https://xkcd.com/1960/

8. What do we actually use from Creative Cloud?
What do these tools do for us?
● Photoshop
● Bridge
● InDesign
● TypeKit
● Image manipulation
● Automation
● Typesetting and ebook output
● Fonts

9. Photoshop
Replacements

10. Creative Repetitive
Affinity
Photopea
GIMP
sips ImagemagickCanva

11. https://www.photopea.com/

12. Introducing the command line
>_

13. ‘What I hope is that those with
knowledge of the humanities will
break into the closed society where
code gets written: invade it.’
— Ellen Ullman, Life in Code

14. $ sips -Z 2000 *.jpg

15. $ sips -Z 2000 *.jpg --out low/

16. $ /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/
Homebrew/install/master/install)"

17. Imagemagick

18. InDesign
Replacements

21. ‘The problem of printing beautiful
books had changed from a problem
of metallurgy to a problem of optics
and then to a problem of computer
science.’
— Donald Knuth, Digital Typography

23. $ brew install pandoc

24. Markdown has all you need

25. $ pandoc manuscript.docx -o
text.md

26. pandoc filters

27. INPUT
AST
AST
OUTPUT
reader
filter
writer

28. $ pandoc metadata.yaml --toc-depth=2
--epub-stylesheet=../blitz.css
--epub-chapter-level=2 -o 2016-4.epub -t
epub3
../preface.md
2016-intro.md
amazon.md
on-amazon-stores.md
if-amazon-pricing-of-ebooks.md

30. LaTeX and automated print typesetting
● TeX – the O.G.
● LaTeX – packages
● pdfTeX – PDF output
● XeLaTeX – Unicode!
● LuaTeX – scripting in Lua

33. ‘If the book appears to be only a
paper machine, produced at their
own convenience by other
machines, only machines will want
to read it.’
— Robert Bringhurst,
The Elements of Typographic Style

34. Go forth now and make masterpieces of
the (ebook) publishing art!

35. Thanks!
@nickbarreto
@simon_collinson