Electric Book template, 23 Dec 2022

This is a major restructuring of the Electric Book template. It introduces many new features. Notably:

1. We've removed the /text folder, moving markdown files up into the book folder, alongside the images, styles and fonts folders. This results in shorter URLs (no /text/ path) that are better for readability and SEO. It also provides a more intuitive mental model for editing, because markdown files are the foundation of the book, onto which we add images, styles and fonts.
2. For PDF output, by default all HTML files are merged into one HTML file. This means you can create shorter web pages (e.g. subsections of chapters), but still avoid page breaks between them in PDF output.
3. Book metadata (in _data) is now split into book-specific files. We've replaced the meta.yml file with separate metadata files, where each book gets its own file. This makes it much easier to maintain projects with several books.
4. We've replaced the interactive output scripts with cross-platform Node commands. Processes (like output or image processing) are run with a single command. This makes it possible to automate commands (e.g. from a web- or Electron-based GUIs in future, or for automated testing). See the new README for details.
5. We've added a command that checks for basic project structure, and a command that adds a new book folder based on an existing book.
6. Prototyping a new book is much faster, because it's not necessary to create nav and toc nodes in book metadata for web navigation to work. Until you do specify those nodes in book metadata, navigation and TOCs will be automatically built from available files. See the book folder in the template for an example.

We've also made general improvements to HTML structures, epub structure, and the organisation of Sass files for custom theming. The default styling is a little more elegant, while remaining as unopinionated (aka vanilla) as possible, ready for customisation.

We've removed version numbering from the _config.yml file, and won't use semver numbering on releases going forward. Semantic versioning is not that useful for a template (as opposed to an upgradeable software app), and the current master branch here is always the latest version of the template. If we create tagged releases in future, it will be to document major new features, and provide a way to notify those watching this repo.

Electric Book template v0.19.0

Releases of the Electric Book template are largely ceremonial, since our master branch includes all the latest features as they are developed. Since v0.18.0, changes include:

• New CSS structure for themeable design
• Easier Javascript in epubs
• Improve appearance of nested nav items
• Add interactive slide sequences
• Suggest Jekyll v4 when managing own Jekyll version
• Remove Formspree, and allow site-wide pages in the project root
• Match the GitHub Pages Jekyll version by default
• Improve the structure of styles for easier development
• Enable video options, and a generic video include
• Improve logic for setting the HTML title element
• Various minor fixes and refinements (see PRs #508–#542).

Electric Book template v0.18.0

Releases of the Electric Book template are largely ceremonial, since our master branch includes all the latest features as they are developed. Since v0.17.0, changes include:

• Enable bookmarking
• Improve the reliability of search indexes and show 'Searching' notice in UX
• Don't expand books in home nav by default
• Exit the output script if Jekyll builds fail
• Create fallbacks for OG page title
• Let EBM users edit non-book styles, eg landing page
• Improve landing-page presentation and default fonts
• Various minor fixes and refinements.

Electric Book template v0.17.0

Releases of the Electric Book template are largely ceremonial, since our master branch includes all the latest features as they are developed. Since v0.16.0, changes include:

• Add ability to create a zip package of a project
• Improve horizontal scrolling of tables on narrow screens
• Add expand- and close-all buttons to content accordion

Electric Book template v0.16.0

Releases of the Electric Book template are largely ceremonial, since our master branch includes all the latest features as they are developed. Since v0.15.0, we've added many improvements, including:

• Replace Phantom search-index dependency with Puppeteer
• Support starting YouTube and Vimeo videos at specific times
• Add script for faster updating across Electric Book projects
• Zip epubs with Node for better Windows compatibility
• Enable turning image lazyloading on/off in settings.yml
• Implement better paragraph-indent
• Support visible URLs in e-ink epubs
• Generate separate web and app search indexes
• Allow fully translated landing pages
• Lazyload images to save user data
• Create TOCs outside of book files (and other nav fixes)
• Convert .html to .xhtml on epub output
• Don't force a blank baseurl on web output
• Localise home-page title element in locales
• Add ability to hide content behind show-hide buttons
• Add ability to use gap-fill questions
• Add variables for content and style in side-margin boxes
• Enable setting relative size of maths in PDF as a variable
• Various minor fixes and refinements.

Electric Book template v0.15.0

Releases of the Electric Book template are largely ceremonial, since our master branch includes all the latest features as they are developed. Since v0.14.0, we've added many improvements, including:

• An option for multiple column defaults at project, book and doc levels
• The ability to inject SVGs inline for CSS control
• A max-quality image output, e.g. for full-screen landing-page images
• An option for flexibly creating a sidebar in PDF output
• Classes for all PrinceXML-supported floats on figures in PDF
• New shift-up- and shift-down- classes for page refinement
• A dedicated styles folder for non-book pages, so that home- and search-page styling can be independent of the books in the project
• An easy way to set a favicon.
• Better CSS for using images as text dividers.
• Footnote references as popups on the web.
• Scroll tables horizontally on small screens.
• Redaction in PDF output.
• A fix for a bug that was breaking maths in Word export.
• Allow converting endnotes to footnotes in PDF.
• Improvements to video output, and allow turning on YouTube subtitles.
• A fix for a bug where some multiline maths did not show in epub output.
• Many other minor fixes and refinements.

Electric Book template v0.14.0

Releases of the Electric Book template are largely ceremonial, since our master branch includes all the latest features as they are developed. Since v0.13.0, we've added a few improvements, the most significant being a better, faster way to pre-process maths for PDF output.

• Major improvement to preprocessing and output of maths
• Enable turning off or expanding accordion per-page
• Fix to prevent false positives in active menu items
• Add canonical link tag to head for better SEO and annotation
• Hide breadcrumbs on small screens
• Various minor fixes and refinements.

Electric Book template v0.13.0

Releases of the Electric Book template are largely ceremonial, since our master branch includes all the latest features as they are developed. Since v0.12.0, we've added a bunch of improvements. Two major ones are the addition of open annotation with Hypothesis and the ability to create reusable content snippets across books. Another very useful feature is that translation styles now augment, rather than replace, their parent-language styles.

• Add ability to create reusable content items.
• Add annotation with Hypothes.is.
• Translation styles now augment, rather than replace, parent-language styles.
• New setting to avoid inaccurate image-colour-profile conversion on PDF output.
• New docs on building apps, and better Windows app output.
• Prevent spans with .keep-together from breaking over lines.
• Fall back to book and project descriptions for Open Graph descriptions when page description not available.
• Upgrade gulp dependency to 4.0.0.
• Improvements to docs and setup guidance.
• Fix the ability to use a file list as a source for the nav list.
• Various minor fixes and refinements.

Electric Book template v0.12.0

Releases of the Electric Book template are largely ceremonial, since our master branch includes all the latest features as they are developed. Since v0.11.1, we've added a bunch of improvements:

• Add content accordion for web and app outputs.
• Add ability to include multiple-choice questions.
• Better docs on output formats and setting up GitHub Pages.
• Add ability to override epub-specific language.
• Add toc.ncx for backwards-compatible epubs. And fixes to it.
• Add image include for responsive image tags.
• Add support for show-page-number and show-url classes.
• Support a 'start-on-right' class to start new recto pages.
• Distinguish between project logo and project image.
• Localise search pages.
• Add ability to show a baseline grid.
• Add optional back button for app output.
• Various minor fixes and refinements.

Electric Book template v0.11.1

Releases of the Electric Book template are largely ceremonial, since our master branch now includes all the latest features. So, in the spirit of ceremony, here is v0.11.1. Since v0.11.0, we've added a host of improvements:

• Add pagination (next/previous lnks) to web and app outputs.
• Allow RTL text direction to be set per language in locales.
• Use clearer language-select icon.
• Fix issue where app output used web nav for breadcrumbs.
• Remove clumsy doctype entities in epub output.
• Updates to docs.
• Fix issue with timestamps on some Windows machines.
• Improve docs, especially guidance on meta.yml.
• Improvements to iOS app output.
• Replace buggy version of Crimson Roman.
• Allow images to be stored externally.
• Fix epub output of translations.
• Add greyscale colour profiles.
• Add ability to output Lightning Source PDFs.
• Various minor fixes and improvements.