Posted by VolkerLap on Nov 21, 2018; 5:40pm
URL: https://discuss.asciidoctor.org/Basic-Geology-book-of-the-Santorini-volcanic-complex-made-with-Asciidoc-pdf-tp6588.html

Hey there!

I just thought this would be the right place to tell you how thankful I am for AsciiDoctor-pdf. Just a few days ago, I finished writing and publishing a book about Santorini; Rocks and minerals in german language, and it was all done with AsciiDoctor-pdf.



Here's how I approached this.

I used Asciidoc-fx as a editor on windows 7
* There is one "book.adoc" file
* Images in ./image
* A Windows batch with:

asciidoctor-pdf -r  \Ruby24-x64\bin\hyphenation.rb -a pdf-stylesdir=resources/themes -a pdf-style=basic  ./Santorin/book.adoc

The paperback version caused me some headaches initially. Since AsciiDoctor-PDF currently does not prevent widows and orphans, and does not support hyphenation.

I used this hack hyphenation:
https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-pdf/issues/20#issuecomment-279347588


Manual adjustments.

* For the print version, I manually inserted page breaks ("<<<") to prevent any widows and orphans. Sometimes, it also helped to simply shorten a paragraph or change the size of an image.

This turned out really well, without too much additional work. Here's what it looks like:


The paperback version is printed and distributed via https://www.bod.de/buchshop/santorin-volker-lapczynski-9783748166825/

By adapting the standard theme, I could easily set up the PDF with exactly the dimensions required by Bod.de. Bod costs 19 Euros /year (including ISBN, Ebook). There delivering the print in Europe without extra cost. I am still waiting for the ebook, but the GoogleBook is here.

Here are a few things about the AsciiDoctor workflow that caused me trouble, and how I worked around them.

* I faket free space for the imprint with tables
frame="none", grid=none, stripes=none
:media: prepress

* I faket the 6. først pages of the front matter because it is not working in Asciidoc-pdf

I clipped and glued the resulting pdf with pdfsam.org

* A multipage Index i messing up page numbers on every second page. So i positioned the page-number of the index pages manually with LibreOffice Draw.


Other than that, it all worked really well. AsciiDoctor simply rules! :-D

Thanks a lot especially to Dan Allen for his fantastic work on this software. I really enjoyed working with this toolchain, and I'm sure it hasn't been the last time I used it.

Cheers,
Volker Lapczynski

Thanks to Daniel Sperl for his text!