papyrust
When I was writing full-time, one of my favorite pieces of software was Vellum. Vellum makes short work out of building really pretty EPUB and PDF files for ebook and print. It’s a wonderful, albeit expensive, application.
My use of it was very straightforward; I had my preferred layout for front and back matter, had a standardized way of laying out chapters, and it really didn’t take me much time at all to prepare my books for publication using Vellum. If you’re non-technical, like having a GUI, or are just looking for an easy way to build your ebooks and paperbacks, I highly recommend it if you can swing the high price. The entry fee was always worth it to me.
But in an effort to move all my tooling to open-source, I decided to create my own tool for building publication-ready files. And that tool is papyrust. It’s a command line binary, written in Rust, that accepts a folder of markdown files and builds them with opinionated trade-press specifications to EPUB and PDF.
It feels like software licensing is increasingly unreliable. And while I’ve seen no indication that Vellum plans to change anything with licensing, I’ve had the rug pulled on me with favorite tooling in the past. As I edge toward writing once again, I wanted to make sure I was covered in the case that Vellum’s licensing changes to subscription. That’s why I created papyrust.
And in doing so, I probably just replaced Vellum completely in my toolchain regardless.
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