Over the weekend, I was looking into making ebooks out of a directory of markdown files. I use markdown for this blog and also for my to-do list, so i started looking at what was available. I tried mdbook, a rust tool, but couldnt get the pdf maker to work, and it didn't really work in a way I was expecting, it seems more like a documentation website maker.

I thought, 'There must be a Laravel way', and after some searching, @themsaid has made Ibis which is lovely, fast, works well and looking at the source code, is fairly simple.

I installed it slightly differently to the instructions installing it in the new ebook directory like so:

composer require themsaid/ibis:* -W

The initialization command to create the repo was this

./vendor/bin/ibis init

It comes with an example 6 markdown pages of one of Mohamed's Books and the command to make the pdf was like so

./vendor/bin/ibis build

This created a a nice clean pdf with minimal fuss. You can use css to style it and it accepts images in the /assets directory.

The one thing i wonder is how would you create an index at the back? But for today, this is a nice new tool and I can focus on writing the markdown.

If you would like to contact me with this form on londinium.com, ilminster.net or via Twitter @andylondon