bookcraft 0.3.0

A PDF book generator for structured ritual and ceremonial texts

bookcraft

A Python library for generating PDF books from structured text content.

Installation

pip install bookcraft

Usage

from bookcraft import generate

generate(
    books_path="./books/",
    settings_path="./c-settings.yaml",
    fonts_path="./fonts.yaml",
    keywords_path="./c-keywords.yaml",
    output_path="./output/craft.pdf",
    mode="craft",
)

Modes

Mode	Description
craft	Craft, light theme
craft-dark	Craft, dark theme
ra	Royal Arch, light theme
ra-dark	Royal Arch, dark theme

Page format

Pages are plain .txt files named page-1.txt, page-2.txt, etc. inside each book directory.

Headings

A line starting with # is rendered as a heading.

#Opening the Lodge in the First Degree

Roles

A line starting with $ highlights the speaker's role name.

$W. M. Brethren, assist me to open the Lodge.

Line breaks

= at the end of a line inserts a line break. Multiple = insert multiple breaks.

$W. M. What is the first care of every Freemason?=
$J. W. To see that the Lodge is properly tyled.=

Italic text

Text wrapped in > and < is rendered in italic.

$I. G. (to J. W., by name) >I. G. gives k....s and is answered by Tyler.<

Keywords

Words and abbreviations listed in keywords.yaml are automatically rendered in bold wherever they appear in the text.

$W. M. The candidate is an E. A.

Development setup

After cloning, install the pre-commit hooks (one-time):

uv run pre-commit install

This runs type checking and tests automatically before every commit.

Releasing a new version

1. Bump the version in pyproject.toml
2. Add an entry to CHANGELOG.md
3. Commit and tag:

git add pyproject.toml CHANGELOG.md
git commit -m "Release v0.2.0"
git tag v0.2.0
git push && git push --tags

GitHub Actions will build and publish to PyPI automatically.

Content layout

Your content project should provide:

your-project/
├── books/          # directories of page-N.txt files
├── fonts/          # font files referenced in fonts.yaml
├── config/
│   ├── fonts.yaml
│   ├── c-settings.yaml
│   ├── c-keywords.yaml
│   ├── ra-settings.yaml
│   └── ra-keywords.yaml
└── output/         # generated PDFs written here