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Posted on May 9, 2020

Git & Markdown to write a novel

This year, I started writing a historical novel about a branch of my family. I quickly realized I needed some tooling to organize my data: what I know about the characters, the places, a general timeline, etc.

Manuskript

I looked for software to do that and found that the reference is Scrivener. However interesting it looked, I'd rather use Open Source software whenever possible, so I started using Manuskript, an Open Source software for writers similar to Scrivener.

I laid out some chapters, characters, plots… then I realized the saving format was binary. It's actually a Zip archive which contains all the information in flat files:

 1 2020-05-09 08:05 MANUSKRIPT 137 2020-05-09 08:05 infos.txt 0 2020-05-09 08:05 summary.txt 46 2020-05-09 08:05 status.txt 147 2020-05-09 08:05 labels.txt 284 2020-05-09 08:05 characters/0-Samuel_L-on.txt 281 2020-05-09 08:05 characters/1-L-on_Grunberg.txt 261 2020-05-09 08:05 characters/2-Adolphe_Grunberg.txt 309 2020-05-09 08:05 characters/3-Elisabeth_Rau.txt 112 2020-05-09 08:05 characters/4-Victor_Grunberg.txt 109 2020-05-09 08:05 characters/5-Maria_Schorr.txt 224 2020-05-09 08:05 characters/6-Fred_Grunberg.txt 125 2020-05-09 08:05 characters/7-Colonel_de_Villebois-Mareuil.txt 107 2020-05-09 08:05 characters/8-Said_Pacha.txt 109 2020-05-09 08:05 characters/9-Isaac_Aghion.txt 92 2020-05-09 08:05 outline/00-Setup.md 322 2020-05-09 08:05 outline/01-Les_joyaux_-gyptiens/folder.txt 3753 2020-05-09 08:05 outline/01-Les_joyaux_-gyptiens/0-Une_rencontre_inattendue.md 1706 2020-05-09 08:05 outline/01-Les_joyaux_-gyptiens/1-Office_de_chabbat.md 715 2020-05-09 08:05 outline/01-Les_joyaux_-gyptiens/2-Un_d-ner_chez_Isaac.md 482 2020-05-09 08:05 outline/01-Les_joyaux_-gyptiens/3-Proc-s_1.md 166 2020-05-09 08:05 outline/01-Les_joyaux_-gyptiens/4-Sc-ne_5.md 83 2020-05-09 08:05 outline/02-Paris/folder.txt 102 2020-05-09 08:05 outline/02-Paris/0-Sc-ne_1.md 97 2020-05-09 08:05 outline/03-Etudes_des_enfants/folder.txt 103 2020-05-09 08:05 outline/03-Etudes_des_enfants/0-Sc-ne_1.md 103 2020-05-09 08:05 outline/03-Etudes_des_enfants/1-Sc-ne_2.md 95 2020-05-09 08:05 outline/04-Premiers_emplois/folder.txt 103 2020-05-09 08:05 outline/04-Premiers_emplois/0-Sc-ne_1.md 96 2020-05-09 08:05 outline/05-Vers_le_Transvaal/folder.txt 103 2020-05-09 08:05 outline/05-Vers_le_Transvaal/0-Sc-ne_1.md 334 2020-05-09 08:05 outline/21-Epilogue.md 40074 2020-05-09 08:05 revisions.xml 275 2020-05-09 08:05 world.opml 1669 2020-05-09 08:05 plots.xml 2499 2020-05-09 08:05 settings.txt

This is rather good news, and there's ways to automate PDF creation from this within the software, good news again!

However, some things were problematic to me:

I like to tune my pandoc/LaTeX rendering, and the options in Manuskript were pretty limited for that
I'd rather not commit a single Zip file in Git, so I would have preferred to have all the files in the current directory
Manuskript cannot be automated to compile the PDF, you need to go through the GUI and click on buttons. That's a blocker for me.

Going the full-git way

So I decided I would do everything in Git + Markdown, without the help of a third-party application.

Chapters

I'm currently storing the chapters in their own directories, with numbered Markdown files:

chapitres/ ├── 01_les_joyaux_egyptiens │   ├── 00_titre.md │   ├── 01_une_rencontre_innatendue.md │   ├── 02_office_de_chabbat.md │   ├── 03_brody.md │   ├── 04_chabbat_2.md │   ├── 05_diner_chez_isaac.md │   └── 06_audience.md ├── 02_les_enfants_grunberg │   ├── 00_titre.md │   ├── 01_leon.md │   ├── 02_retour.md │   ├── 03_coffre.md │   ├── 04_burtaux.md │   ├── 05_article.md │   └── 06_article2.md ├── 03_annees_noires │   └── 00_titre.md ├── 04_etudes │   └── 00_titre.md ├── 05_premier_travail │   └── 00_titre.md ├── 06_le_creusot │   └── 00_titre.md └── 21_epilogue.md

Characters & Places

The characters documentation is stored in Markdown files as well, and links can be made between them when necessary:

personnages/ ├── Adolphe_Grunberg.md ├── Charlotte_Grunberg.md ├── Elisabeth_Rau.md ├── Emilie_Grunberg.md ├── Felix_Zottier.md ├── Frederic_Grunberg.md ├── Isaac_Aghion.md ├── Jacques_Grunberg.md ├── Leon_Grunberg.md ├── Lucie_Leon.md ├── Marc_Leon.md ├── Mirel_Schorr.md ├── Paul_Grunberg.md └── Samuel_Leon.md

Same goes for places:

lieux/ ├── Alexandrie.md ├── Brody.md ├── Dubno.md ├── Grunberg_Boulogne.md ├── Paris.md ├── Petite_Jonchere.md └── Vienne.md

Links can easily be made between these documentation files:

# Mirel Schorr ## État civil  * Prénoms : Mirel, dite Maria * Nom : Grünberg * Nom de naissance : Schorr ## Portrait Inconnu ## Description physique Inconnu ## Evénements * ca 1800 : ° à [Dubno](../lieux/Dubno.md) (Russie) * Enfance à [Brody](../lieux/Brody.md) (Autriche) avec ses parents [Schachne](Schachne_Schorr.md) et [Sarah](Sarah_Bick.md) et ses frères [Naphtali](Naphtali_Mendel_Schorr.md) et [Osias](Osias_Heschel_Schorr.md)  * 1821: Mariage à [Brody](../lieux/Brody.md)  * 1870 : habite à [Vienne](../lieux/Vienne.md) (testament [Adolphe](Adolphe_Grunberg.md))  * 1877 : habite à [Paris](../lieux/Paris.md) (+) * 1877 : + à [Vienne](../lieux/Vienne.md) ## Habillement Voir sa garde-robe en 1853 dans l'inventaire de [Victor](Victor_Grunberg.md)

Section stats

Manuskript provides stats about the number of words in a section. I've added a Make target for that:

stats: find chapitres/ -name "*.md" -not -name '00_titre.md' -print0 | sort -z | xargs -0 wc -w

Caveat: it also lists the words in the comments…

Building the project

I'm using Pandoc to build the project with my own LaTeX template.

%.md: cat meta.md > $@ find chapitres/ -name "*.md" -print0 | sort -z | xargs -0 cat >> $@ %.tex: %.md pandoc --pdf-engine lualatex --template extended.tex \ --variable numbersections --toc --variable toc-depth=2 \ --variable documentclass=memoir --variable fontsize=12pt \ --filter pandoc-citeproc \ --verbose \ $< -o $@ %.pdf: %.tex OSFONTDIR=$(FONTSDIR) lualatex $< makeindex $*.idx OSFONTDIR=$(FONTSDIR) lualatex $<