Lick the BLUE Things!: new toolchain

Hey folks, Xial here.

The boyfriend was kind enough to load the story onto his bookreader and send me a handful of photos so I know what’s going on as I work my way through the master file and get the editing works done on Partners.

This does wonders for my mood, knowing that it’s coming out mostly as I would like to see it on dedicated hardware. I’ve to go through the chapters at some point to make sure I’ve not missed anything that needs to be cleaned up, editing-wise, find a slightly faster way to get the PET text to automatically export and take its formatting with it, and go from there.

In the interim, I’m waiting on a keyboard to arrive for my tablet. I’d like to be able to do some of the editing outside of my bedroom, possibly at a Starbucks or somewhere else that I can sit with free Wi-Fi and be largely undisturbed for an hour or two at a time. Said keyboard is finally within the country borders, but will take probably a few more days to get to me. That’ll be nice.

Hey folks, Xial here.

I’ve mentioned in the past in a couple of places that I am having some toolchain issues — namely with conversion and ePub output for converting Partners.

What I hadn’t mentioned as much is how much the broken toolchain demoralizes me as an editor. The annoyances of trying to edit a file, troubleshoot an issue that doesn’t have an obvious answer, plus the clearly non-robust system that comprises NimbleWriter leaves much, much to be desired.
I open the file, realize there’s nearly 142,000 words (!!), and plod through an issue, trying to edit things using Markdown (geez, why), when this clearly needs typesetting and love that isn’t present in the editor of choice. Typesetting basics that are even available in most off-the-shelf blogging packages like this no-name thing called WordPress.

I wanted to use Word or an equivalent initially, but I needed something that would let me output an ePub from time to time in order to test things. I wasn’t having any luck with the plugins I had found, so NimbleWriter was exceptionally attractive when I started looking at it.

That love affair is over, though, and let’s be honest, other than being able to use Solarized Dark as my UI theme in Nimble, there’s little to hold me there.

The best boyfriend in the world asked me the other night in a conversation,

(Best Boyfriend in the World) – Last Saturday at 21:44

Actually, before I go I’ve been meaning to ask: have you heard of pandoc before?

I hadn’t. So of course, I race over to the Bing, search for it, and start reading its documentation.

I’m completely okay with command line tools, being of an age where many machines didn’t have a pretty, clicky GUI. I’m still reading through the documentation in bursts, but the short of it is that I can finally work in LibreOffice on my local machine, and feed the output file to pandoc from time to time to get a test version of the story as an ePub. 🙂

The remaining challenge is replacing my ePub reader. I think I can safely say the Kobo’s a lost cause — the replacement battery is annoyingly expensive to source. Annoyingly so that a newer reader is probably a better choice. I just want to locate a reader that offers ePub support, which means that Amazon’s Kindle series are dead out.

I’ve been taking frequent breaks to give my arm a break, wandering around the house, petting cats, listening to music. But now I’m eager to really put Pandoc to the test.