Bjorn's MD-ebooks

Bjorn's MD-ebooks

Use 'markdown' to author ebooks, help systems and PDFs

- a web app -

Sorry, this app has been decommissioned.

Use "markdown" to author complete ebooks, help systems and PDFs.

Bjorn's MD-ebooks is a modern single page app (SPA) for authoring sets of "markdown" documents and to combine these documents to either ebooks (see section on Gbooks below), help systems or PDFs.

You keep your markdown files as well as the project file safe and secure in a folder in your Gdrive.

The Project

A project is essentially a Gdrive folder with a set of markdown (.md) files (called chapters). The project defines the order of the chapters as well as your own custom variables that you can use in your .md files.

You "compile" the project (the chapters) into an "output". Outputs can be ebooks, helpsystems, HTML files, Google Docs or PDFs. The compiled output is uploaded to your Gdrive. See the video link at the bottom on how this works.

You can hyperlink chapters, the compiler will convert these links to the correct HTML links.

The Markdown editor

Web app (PWA) for markdown authoring - runs in any modern browser.
Opens .md files from local hard drive or Google Drive. "Open with" support for .md files.
Live preview of markdown 2 HTML.
Set markdown paragraph types (make headings, lists, code etc).
Export and upload generated HTML to Gdrive or local hard drive.

Quickly create markdown tables by inserting data from Google Sheets, CSV files or TAB delimited text.
Re-format markdown tables.
Sort markdown tables.
Re-arrange markdown tables - move rows up/down, move columns left/right.

Use different CSS stylesheets when previewing.
Quickly insert emojis.
Manage and use your personal collection of favorite emojis.
Select and embed image data (convert images to "data urls").
Speedy access to accent characters.

Re-use snippets of often used text.

Variables

Include text that frequently changes and appears often in your documents as variables.

Variables are also useful for providing information that is updated automatically, such as the current date or time.

They furthermore enable "single sourcing" - using the same set of source documents to generate different versions of a help system.

System variables

Variable	Description
Date	The date when document is created
Date:short	The date when document is created, short format
Date:iso	The date when document is created, ISO format
Time	The time when document is created
Time:short	The time when document is created, short format
Time:iso	The time when document is created, ISO format
UserEMail	Your email address
UserName	Your name
UserFirstName	Your first name

System variables - pages

Variable	Description
Title	The title of the page
PrevTitle	The title of the previous page
NextTitle	The title of the next page

Gbook - a new kind of online eBOOK

The Gbook format is purely based on web standards such as JSON, CSS and HTML. The reader itself is a Single Application Page (SAP).

Gbooks are hosted on your Google Drive as a public folder.

Readers of your Gbooks can add public comments as well as rate each page. As an author, you can reject or approve each comment. The reader insight dashboard provides you with all sorts of analysis, for example, most viewed page, search phrases not found etc.

Embedded mini-quizzes

You can embed simple drag'n'drop quizzes by using simple markup. (short demo video)

The markup is plain text (and not HTML) to support regular text editors such as Google Docs and MSWord.

Here is markup for a three item drag and drop quiz. The task is to drag Item1, Item2, Item3 to the correct target box.

[Drag] Item1=Target1

[Drag] Item2=Target2

[Drag] Item3=Target3

The embedded quiz will look like this when injected into the topic.

[Drag] Item1=Target1

[Drag] Item2=Target2

[Drag] Item3=Target3

Here is another example with a simple Harry Potter quiz:

[Instruction] Match first names with surnames:

[Drag] Barty=Crouch

[Drag] Fleur=Delacour

[Drag] Albus=Dumbledore

[Drag] Seamus=Finnigan

[Drag] Bellatrix=Lestrange

[Drag] Minerva=McGonagall