Because this Chess book was originally written in Markdown and posted as a series of chapters to my WordPress blog, it did not have any concept of pages or margins because this is not needed to view it on the web. Making a paper book, on the other hand, is different because a physical book is a real physical object of a certain width and height. Some adjustments were needed to submit it to Kindle Direct Publishing.
Therefore, I came up with a process to convert the text into a form that Amazon would accept for an 8.5-inch by 11-inch size book. The following are the exact steps I used with a combination of Pandoc and LibreOffice
- I created the default odt file that Pandoc uses for style reference. This command came straight from the Pandoc documentation.
pandoc -o custom-reference.odt --print-default-data-file reference.odt
-
I opened the custom-reference.odt file in LibreOffice and modified the left and right page margins to 0.5 for left and right. The images are exactly 7.5 inches wide, so this makes them perfectly centered to fit within the width margins of a page that is 8.5×11 inches. The top and bottom margins are not quite as important, but I set them to 0.5 for consistency.
-
I also changed the style of “Heading 1” to automatically include a page break before the heading so that each chapter would start on a new page.
-
Finally, I used the reference doc after modification as an input when making a new odt conversion of the book.
pandoc ChastityChessChapters.md -o book.odt --reference-doc custom-reference.odt
This file should look good enough to export directly as a PDF in LibreOffice. Although this may seem overly complicated, this process is more useful than you might expect. For one, it bypasses the use of “Industry Standard” tools like Microsoft Word that most writers think they need. Pandoc and LibreOffice are the only two software programs you need to create good-looking documents from Markdown files.
However, this process is unnecessary for most books that contain only text. It was precisely because my Chess book had a lot of pictures that I used Markdown. I used this method because it allowed better control of the images than I could do in LibreOffice alone.
I would also like to mention that several note-taking apps were useful to me as I was writing the book. Below are my top 3 favorite programs out of the many I installed and tried out.
All 3 of those apps are useful for their ability to preview the output of what the source Markdown code will look like. For Mobile devices, Joplin and Simplenote are the best. For a PC with Windows, Mac, or Linux, ghostwriter is especially helpful because it works directly with plain text files on your system just like Notepad does, but it also allows a preview just like Joplin and Simplenote do. Testing the images was essential for making sure my pictures were linked correctly!
In case you were wondering, all of the artwork was made using the program Inkscape. The Chess, Shogi, and Xiangqi pieces are either under a GPL or Public Domain license and came from open-source projects like lichess, lishogi and pychess.
More copies of this book in paperback form can be purchased here on Amazon.
You can buy the paperback edition of Chastity’s Chess Chapters or you can continue reading it for free on this blog.
Chastity's Chess Challenge 
Please leave me any comments or questions you have! I will update posts if necessary based on user feedback!