Welcome to The Pocket Pipeline. This very small book exists for one reason: to prove that Markdown can flow through Pandoc and Typst and come out the other side as a print-ready PDF for Kindle Direct Publishing.
The body text is set in Libertinus Serif and justified, with hyphenation, so the right margin stays even—just as it should in a real book. Notice that the first line of a chapter’s opening paragraph is not indented, while the paragraphs that follow it are.
A few ordinary things every manuscript needs:
And the same content as an ordered list:
Ready to try it? Exercise #1 — clone the repository, run the build, and open the PDF. You will do the fuller version in Exercise #2 at the end of the next chapter.
Exercises like the one above are numbered automatically, and every one is collected in the List of Exercises at the back. Notice that the reference to Exercise #2 already knows its number, even though we have not reached it yet.
A blockquote, for those moments when a book wants to quote itself.
Good typography is mostly invisible. The reader notices a bad line break or a cramped margin, but rarely a good one.
In a printed book the inside margin must be wider than the outside, because the binding swallows part of each page. KDP rejects interiors that ignore this, which is exactly why this pipeline sets an asymmetric gutter rather than symmetric margins.
This second section exists so the table of contents has more than one entry per chapter. It also confirms that bold and italic survive the journey from Markdown all the way to the printed page.
Exercise #2 — build the print output and upload the interior PDF to a KDP draft (you need not actually publish it). Then look back at Exercise #1 to see how far you have come. In the printed book that reference carries the page number; on screen it is a live link.
Footnotes land at the foot of the page, where they belong.↩︎