redtext mirror tools

These are the tools used to create and maintain a red texts mirror.

Introduction

To create an archive, run:

git clone https://github.com/redtexts/mirror-tools
cd mirror-tools
./mirror.sh

This will guide you through the configuration process, and warn you if you don't have the right software installed. Your configuration will by default be stored in a file called .mconf. mirror.sh doesn't expect you to edit this by hand, hence only do so if you are absolutely certain of what you are doing.

The script will only generate output, if something goes wrong or pandoc generates warning (eg. <standard input>:6882: a special character is not allowed in a name) - one doesn't have to worry about the latter.

If you have a multiprocessor system, you can add options like -j4 to let the underlying make system know that it can use up to four threads. Generally speaking, every option given to mirror.sh will be passed on to make.

mirror.sh also supports automatic synchronisation, if rsync or scp is installed.

Common issues

Make sure that you have a directory named ./txt/ in the root directory of this repository. This directory must contain all the markdown files, which are to be processed. If no files are found, naturally, nothing can be done.

This directory also serves as the "build directory". All .html, .epub, .mobi and .pdf files will first be generated in here, and afterwards copied or linked (depending on what you decided to choose while configuring your mirror) into the their respective directories.

Background

To properly build everything, the following tools will have to be installed, besides a standard *NIX userland:

• make: for coordinating the building of the necessary documents
• pandoc (version 2.0 or greater): to convert from markdown to .epub, .html and .pdf
• Calibre, or specifically ebook-convert: to convert from .epub to .mobi
• XeTeX/XeLaTeX: for proper, quality pdf generation or Groff: for quick and lightweight pdf generation
• AWK: for generating index.html and keywords.html and extracting metadata from the markdown files.

At the very least make, pandoc and AWK are required. This will let you generate .html and .epub files.

Customisation

To customize your specific mirror, edit the res/header.txt and res/footer.txt files to respectivly add HTML markup above and below the generated text table. If these are not found, no text is inserted and no error is reported.

If you wish to have a different layout on your mirror, all you have to do is customise the style.css file in the root directory of this repository (not /res/style.css).

In case want to change your mirror.sh config, either delete the .auto file in your working directory, in case you told mirror.sh to automatically use your configuration.

Legal

All code is in the public domain. Originally written by Xatasan, 2017.