As ebook professionals, Adobe software is almost invariably at the core of our working lives: InDesign, Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator, and the list goes on. But what would an #eprdctn world without Adobe look like? In this talk, Simon Collinson and Nick Barreto of Canelo Digital Publishing will walk the audience through their Adobe-free toolbelt, giving tips, tricks, and warning of potholes to avoid. The overriding theme will be the fun/challenge of building a heterogeneous toolchain, rolling your own tools, and the efficiencies you can find if you can engineer your workflow from the ground up.

1. Life after Adobe
Building beautiful ebooks with
open-source tools
Simon Collinson & Nick Barreto
ebookcraft 2018

2. About us
Nick Barreto
● Co-founder, Technology Director, Canelo Digital Publishing
● @nickbarreto
Simon Collinson
● Manager, Content Sales, Rakuten Kobo
(formerly Digital Editor, Canelo)
● @simon_collinson

3. Overview
● The cost of Creative Cloud
● Crimes against #eprdctn
● What do we actually use from Creative Cloud?
● Photoshop replacements
● <aside>Introducing the command line</aside>
● InDesign replacements
● A smattering of LaTeX

4. The cost of Creative Cloud

6. Crimes against
#eprdctn
● Unlinked indexes
● Soft hyphens
● Lost scene breaks
● Glyphs as images
● Div soup
● Span bouillabaisse

7. https://xkcd.com/1960/

8. What do we actually use from Creative Cloud?
What do these tools do for us?
● Photoshop
● Bridge
● InDesign
● TypeKit
● Image manipulation
● Automation
● Typesetting and ebook output
● Fonts

9. Photoshop
Replacements

10. Creative Repetitive
Affinity
Photopea
GIMP
sips ImagemagickCanva

11. https://www.photopea.com/

12. Introducing the command line
>_

13. ‘What I hope is that those with
knowledge of the humanities will
break into the closed society where
code gets written: invade it.’
— Ellen Ullman, Life in Code

14. $ sips -Z 2000 *.jpg

15. $ sips -Z 2000 *.jpg --out low/

16. $ /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/
Homebrew/install/master/install)"

17. Imagemagick

18. InDesign
Replacements

21. ‘The problem of printing beautiful
books had changed from a problem
of metallurgy to a problem of optics
and then to a problem of computer
science.’
— Donald Knuth, Digital Typography

23. $ brew install pandoc

24. Markdown has all you need

25. $ pandoc manuscript.docx -o
text.md

26. pandoc filters

27. INPUT
AST
AST
OUTPUT
reader
filter
writer

28. $ pandoc metadata.yaml --toc-depth=2
--epub-stylesheet=../blitz.css
--epub-chapter-level=2 -o 2016-4.epub -t
epub3
../preface.md
2016-intro.md
amazon.md
on-amazon-stores.md
if-amazon-pricing-of-ebooks.md

30. LaTeX and automated print typesetting
● TeX – the O.G.
● LaTeX – packages
● pdfTeX – PDF output
● XeLaTeX – Unicode!
● LuaTeX – scripting in Lua

33. ‘If the book appears to be only a
paper machine, produced at their
own convenience by other
machines, only machines will want
to read it.’
— Robert Bringhurst,
The Elements of Typographic Style

34. Go forth now and make masterpieces of
the (ebook) publishing art!

35. Thanks!
@nickbarreto
@simon_collinson