Chapter 1 Why it exists

Book4matter lets you keep your text, and the formatting separate:

• You can write your manuscript in Markdown or text, without worrying about formatting
• • You can read, diff, and version these text files in git.
• The metadata (title, author, rights) lives in one small YAML file.
• The style (trim, margins, fonts) lives in another YAML file.

Point ten books at one style file and restyle them all from a single edit. The manuscript never changes.

Chapter 2 Print PDF

A ready-to-print PDF.

I’ve used this for Amazon KDP, so it follows the rules there, like “no hyperlinks”.

External hyperlinks are reformatted to show the URL after the anchor text.

Book4matter (https://www.book4matter.com)

Internal links are converted to page number references

Book4matter on page 37

A table of contents is automatically generated. This PDF does not include a cover, since that is a separate upload on KDP.

Chapter 3 Shareable PDF

The same book with live, clickable hyperlinks and a linked table of contents — the version you email or post, not the one you send to a printer. This version can include a cover image, if you want.

Chapter 4 EPUB

A reflowable e-book that passes the W3C EPUBCheck validator (the same class of checks KDP runs on upload), so most rejections are caught before you ever upload.

Note: Each EPUB publisher has different requirements. They restrict things like manuscript length, image size, and even limits on references to other publishers. You’ll want to check these out, before publishing.

Chapter 5 Website

One self-contained HTML page with an automatic table of contents and your own stylesheet

This is how this website was generated.

Chapter 6 The user manual

The Book4matter User Manual explains how to write, configure, and build your books. It is also a working example of the tool documenting itself.

• HTML
• Shareable PDF
• Print PDF
• EPUB

Chapter 7 The demo

The Pocket Pipeline — a short worked example that exercises the features.

• HTML
• Shareable PDF
• Print PDF
• EPUB

Chapter 8 A novel

The Smallest Fire — An example to show the pipeline on plain text input. (AI generated)

• HTML
• Shareable PDF
• Print PDF
• EPUB

Chapter 9 Install Docker

https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/

Chapter 10 Get book4matter

Pull the image from Docker Hub:

docker pull book4matter/book4matter

You can see the entry for book4matter on docker hub.

Chapter 11 Make a book

A book is just a directory:

my-book/
  book_metadata.yaml    # title, author, rights
  book_style.yaml       # trim, margins, fonts
  chapters/
    010-first.md
    020-second.md

Chapters are combined in filename order, so a numeric prefix controls the sequence.

Chapter 12 Build it

Mount the folder that holds your book at /work and name the form you want. Everything after the image name is an ordinary bf command:

docker run --rm -v "$PWD":/work book4matter/book4matter print my-book/   # KDP print interior PDF
docker run --rm -v "$PWD":/work book4matter/book4matter pdf   my-book/   # shareable PDF with live links
docker run --rm -v "$PWD":/work book4matter/book4matter epub  my-book/   # validated EPUB
docker run --rm -v "$PWD":/work book4matter/book4matter html  my-book/   # single-page website

Each command writes into my-book/out/; the tool only ever writes there, never back over your manuscript.

Chapter 13 Real book typography

Powered by Typst under the hood: proper hyphenation and justification, small title/copyright/contents front matter, running heads, and quality book faces (Libertinus Serif for text, a Helvetica-metric sans for headings) bundled right in the image — no font wrangling. You can use your own fonts, too, of course.

Chapter 14 KDP Support

Trim sizes, gutter margins that scale with page count, and an EPUB that clears the same validator KDP uses. The defaults aim at a US 6×9 trade paperback that uploads clean.

Chapter 15 Markdown you already know

Standard Pandoc Markdown: headings, emphasis, lists, block quotes, footnotes, tables, images, and hyperlinks. Plain .txt works too, for novelists who want nothing but words and scene breaks.

Chapter 16 Novels and non-fiction alike

Treat top-level headings as parts (or sections) with chapters beneath, or flip a switch and let them be numbered chapters in a novel with no visible headings at all.

Chapter 17 Import from Word

Already have a .docx? Book4matter can import it, split it into chapter files on its headings, and pull the embedded images out for you — a running start instead of a blank page.

Chapter 18 Reproducible by design

You can run everything from a pinned Docker image. No host installs, no network at build time, and the same inputs produce the same outputs on any machine.

If you want more control, you can install locally, or you can build the docker image locally, and run that way.

Chapter 19 Afterword

Book4matter is a thin pipeline over two excellent tools, wired together so you never have to touch either directly.

1. Pandoc reads your Markdown and your two YAML config files.
2. For print and PDF, Pandoc emits Typst, and Typst does the page layout — margins, running heads, hyphenation, front matter.
3. For EPUB and HTML, Pandoc writes those directly, sharing the same metadata and styling decisions.

Because the styling lives outside your prose, the same manuscript flows into every format without edits, and one change to a style file re-themes every book that points at it.

Chapter 20 Book4matter Advantages

1. It’s open source. If you don’t like the way something works, you can change it.
2. You can use your favorite editor. While many tools with editors allow you to import, they usually assume you will import once, and work in their editor from that point on. Why would you want to learn a new editor?
3. Automation. The command line version can be automated. For example, you can have your book automatically republised whenever you make a change. Or you can automatically apply formatting changes to multiple books.
4. You can work in text or markdown which work well with version control systems, like git. While these are generally only used by technical folk, being able to track changes is highly useful. And git plays well with automatically publishing a new version of your book, when changes are made.
5. Web app or command line. You can use book4matter without installing anything, or you can run the command line version on your local machine. The choice is yours.

Chapter 21 Advantages of Other Tools

Many of the alternatives have a broader ranges of predesigned styles for books. Book4matter give you a lot of control, but only one default style.

Paid tools frequently come with customer support.

Some have local applications you can run, which can give a nicer interface than a web app.

Chapter 22 Alternative Tools