: How best to format a novel written in Markdown I want to use a text editor (Emacs) to write a novel because I don't want to consider page layout and other similar issues. I want to use

Vote Up Vote Down

I use LaTeX.

It allows the use of any kind of text editor.
It’s distraction free.
Since it’s based on classes, you won’t have to worry at all about what is the best way to format, since anybody who gets your manuscript will have it formatted — without changing anything — in the way they want.

You will have a hard time converting it to docx, but it’s really simple to convert it to PDF. Most LaTeX editors already have a compiler.

Besides, since LaTeX is written in plain text, you can use tools like Github or Bitbucket to keep track of all the changes you and your editor make.

Here is a small LaTeX class I use in my documents, just as an example.

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

This is my sort of question, since I have basically the same setup as you do (except I use Vim, not Emacs.)

My novel text looks like this:

% Novel Title

# Title 1

Text goes here.

# Title 2

More text goes here.

This works fine for me, since Pandoc wants to convert the top-level section markers # into chapter breaks, exactly as intended. The only snag is that there isn't any easy way to indicate scene breaks, so I wound up using a literal # to mark scene breaks (since the # is the scene break marker in standard manuscript format). I pass the author information and other metadata as variables on the command line when I invoke Pandoc.

Depending on how fancy you want your output to look, it may be worthwhile to get your text through an intermediate format such as RTF. The RTF format is human-readable (in theory), and Pandoc lets you create the RTF doc from a template so that you can specify your fonts, headers, etc. Note, however, that getting a good RTF template set up could take you several hours of experimentation.

(0)