New book: Developing with compile time in mind

[Rikki Cattermole via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On 18/02/2015 5:08 a.m., Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 2/17/15 3:49 AM, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
>> On Tue, 2015-02-17 at 16:40 +1300, Rikki Cattermole via
>> Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
>>>
>> […]
>>> Just let me know any improvements that could be made. Updates are
>>> free after all! (Leanpub is amazing, what with markdown writing and
>>> all).
>>
>> How did you find Markdown for writing a book?
>>
>> My prejudice is that you need XeLaTeX or AsciiDoc for large document
>> writing, especially when targeting press PDF.
>
> Mine too. However, PDF is for fixed layout and any future book should
> aim at flexible format or at least multiple fixed layouts.
>
> I think Markdown's use for a book is "works, won't ever win an interior
> design contest".
>
> TDPL's second edition will most likely use ddoc macros to generate
> LaTeX, HTML, and a couple of ebook formats.
>
>
> Andrei

Idk Makura version (leanpub's specification) is pretty nice.
You really don't think about formatting much. You just make the content 
and let it do the rest.

Everything you put into the markdown documents themselves are pretty 
straight forward easy to read and understand e.g.

{title="On top of code snippet text"}
```D
void main() {
     import std.stdio;
     writeln("Hello World!");
}
```

And yes it support D code blocks :D Much better then my previous method 
of using images. In fact this is a requirement for me.

You can configure Makura's generation via a config file which includes 
output page size. So right now leanpub is generating pdf's that can be 
used on lulu.com. There is some modifications need to be done e.g. blank 
last page. But that's about it. Specifically for a pocketbook.

I would highly recommend giving leanpub a go. I absolutely fell in love 
with it.

In fact I'm seriously considering implementing Makura in D once I have a 
good pdf generation library. I know we already have a markdown library 
but I might just make my own.