ubook

Markdown is ultimately a pre-HTML format and inherits its weaknesses. It is a display language.

Books have their own foibles; table of contents, notes, indexes etc. These really need a semantic approach.

Finally, I'm not suggesting anyone handcode it. I use a writing tool on my iPad that uses markdown as its file format. I never see the markdown, I just bold text, add headings etc. That was the idea, to keep it in the background. Hence the reason I'm aiming for simplicity.

Incidentally, most books need only ten tags, five of which are used exactly once on the title page.

Footnotes are bits of text tagged on at the end, like Wikipedia for instance. UBook semantically tags them so they are available where the note exists in the book. Presumably a popup or panel when you touch or click the note marker in the text. It was a bad use of words. It was meant to convey the idea you didn't jump to the end of the chapter or book to read a note. HTML-based formats just use anchors.

Yes, compiler is ambiguous. The idea behind it is a clean interim language a writing tool could export to, and software could then adapt to other formats like Kindle etc.

I have no idea. I have coded for different ebook formats, and used various tools. I just felt it was a mess. I wanted to see if a simple markdown-style language might help create a universal approach that could be used as a basis for outputting to competing formats.

It is an experiment as much as anything, and it is on HN just to see what people think of the idea.

You've possibly never tried to create ebooks then. Even something simple like a table of contents is handled quite differently by different formats. Many convertors aim to convert Word docs into ebooks, for example, and are poor.

But time will tell. You could be right. If there is no demand it will fail to catch on. But the ambition to to provide a single universal format that can then be output to different formats.

Thanks for the feedback though.

Edit: I meant to add; the goal is not for people to hand code it. The ideal is the format is used invisibly by writing software, or perhaps as an export format. Obviously I only "released" it an hour ago, so like markdown, in the first instance its a rough and ready thing, only usable in a text editor.

No, the language itself is pre-release. The posting here is basically a first showing.

The idea is to encourage convertors of course. For the author or book designer to mark it up as a UBook, then be able to export that to anything e.g. Kindle, ePub etc.

The focus at the moment is in defining the tags, then encouraging others to use it as a universal method to semantically encode books in a very simple way.

UBook is a universal language to help authors, publishers and book designers easily markup and format books. Like markdown it uses simple, semantic tags to create a plain text file that can be transformed into something more complex such as HTML, saving the compiler the job of managing complex code.

It is designed as an intermediary language but it is hoped it can be a publishing language in its own right.

It can handle any type of book, from simple novels to very complex textbooks. Although similar to markdown it has a number of features to cope with the specific demands of book publishing:

1. The table of contents is compiled automatically using a simple, intuitive method;

2. No footnotes or endnotes;

3. Structural components unique to books are included e.g. scene breaks and page breaks;

4. Complex elements are included e.g. tables, links, images and indexes;

5. The final file is just a zip file; the manuscript is a plain text file.

UBook is a not-for-profit, open project designed to solve a problem. It simplifies the production of ebooks, and focuses on a universal method of doing so. It is at a pre-release stage, and I would welcome any insights you have to offer.

If you have an interest in ePublishing, web languages, HTML, markdown etc. please do check it out.