#Plain text workflow how to
#Plain text workflow pdf
#Plain text workflow archive
#Plain text workflow trial

In order for this to work you need to tell Pandoc which PDF engine to use when converting, which means adding something to the command when you run it. I don’t know why, so don’t ask me.Īt the beginning of my markdown documents I now have a preamble/YAML header that looks like this:.

#Plain text workflow trial

You’ll need to tell Pandoc which PDF engine to use in order for this to work, and your choice of fonts is limited, but there is some customisation available here without using external style sheets.Īfter some trial and error the PDF engine that works best for me is LuaTeX. This isn’t supported in basic markdown but you can do it with LaTeX, and you can mix some simple LaTeX commands into your markdown without any issues. I wanted to change the fonts in my PDF, because of course I did.

There were a couple of things that bugged me about the base output from Pandoc that I spent some time trying to fix, so let’s cover them quickly. You can see my whole process from start to finish here. This applies styles in InDesign based on the styling in my markdown document and makes life very, very simple for me.

I also use a script to import markdown to InDesign for when I do my print layouts. A few people have asked why I output in HTML, and the answer is so that I can do things like this. I draft in Ghostwriter using markdown (which is where I’m writing this post) and I output using Pandoc to HTML, epub, and plain text PDF. Right now my workflow doesn’t look much different to the one laid out in Luke’s post. I stand by this method as a means of producing multiple formats quickly and easily, but there’s still work to be done in making them as accessible as we’d like them to be. I had already written this and posted it to Detritus but I’ve updated this public-facing post to reflect what we learned. that Pandoc (and a few methods that Matt Sanders is working on in this direction) are falling down. Yubi also spent a lot of time with me and a few others in my Gather this week running things through screenreaders for us and generally showing us how the PDFs etc.

#Plain text workflow archive

I also recently discovered The Annotated Archive of Game Design Resources and in particular their Accessibility section, which is a fantastic resource I’ll be digging in to more over the next few weeks. Luke’s post about using markdown and Pandoc to make documents got me started working in markdown, and both Luke and Michael have helped me when I’ve had questions or needed to try and talk something through or figure things out.

#Plain text workflow how to

Yubi first opened my eyes to the sorry state of accessibility in TTRPGs and helped me make sure that d36 was as accessible as we knew how to make it be at the time.

I’ve been helped massively along the way by Yubi, Luke Gearing, and Michael T. I don’t care if you use this yourself or not and I’m not making any judgements either way. I’m not a teacher, I haven’t taken good notes while I’ve been learning this stuff, I’m just sharing some thoughts and my own ways of doing things. I’m building on things I’ve learned from friends, from endless Googling to figure stuff out, and from best guesses about how things might work. I also want to acknowledge the potential drawbacks of this process and look at some things that I’d like to explore or figure out in the future. I wanted to take a few minutes to write something up about my workflow, why I’m doing what I’m doing, and the things I’ve learned along the way. I’ve been talking a lot recently about different versions of accessibility in the products we release. What you’re reading on this site came from the same source file as the PDF that I link at the end of the post. All I’ve done is make a graphic to go at the top of the post. The text below was copy and pasted directly from the markdown document into a markdown block on my WordPress post editor. Something I didn’t mention in this post originally but am adding in now because I’ve just thought about it, is that I have done exactly zero additional work to get this post ready to go on the blog.