About Saint-Simon

Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, (1675-1755), best known as a memoirist had a profound influence on many writers including Stendhal, Blazac and Marcel Proust. His monumental Mémoires are a classic of French literature, giving the fullest and most lively account of the court at Versailles of Louis XIV and the Régence at the start of Louis XV's reign.

This is volume I of the celebrated Mémoires de Saint-Simon.

Structure

The book's source is organised along the following lines:

  (...)
    └── novel title         →  book title
        ├── css             →  style sheets (epub)
        ├── epub            →  epub created by pandoc
        ├── fonts           →  default publisher's fonts (epub)
        ├── html            →  html created by pandoc
        ├── images          →  covers: cover.png (epub), cover_4x3.png (pdf) 
        ├── latex           →  latex files created by pandoc
        ├── md              →  markdown source (pandoc flavor)
        ├── pdf             →  pdf(s) created by pandoc ("raw" pdf — i.e. with no cover image)
        ├── pdfc            →  pdf(s) created by pandoc (with cover image)
        ├── xml             →  metadata.xml (epub)
        ├── zip             →  zipped archive of the pdf directory ("raw" - text-only pdfs)
        ├── zipc            →  zipped archive of the pdfc directory (with cover image added)
        ├── README.md       →  this README file in github's markdown format
        └── Makefile        →  set of rules to build html, epub, and pdf versions of the novels

Building

If you are only interested in reading this book, the master branch already has the current state-of-the art version available (in html, epub, and pdf format) in the corresponding subdirectories.

In the event you wish to make minor changes (such as for instance fixing typos, improving the formatting, switching to a different font, providing your own cover images... etc.) for your own personal use you can do following:

1. git clone the project (or download/unpack the zip file)

2. make your changes in the master branch

3. navigate to the top of the book's directory and execute the following commands from the shell prompt:

   $ make clean $ make target

... Where target can be any of the following:

1. make (ibid. make all): recreate all the output files (html, epub, pdf...) in one pass
2. make allpdf: recreate all the pdf output (raw and with cover image)
3. make pdf: recreate the pdfs (no cover image)
4. make epub: recreate the epub
5. make html: recreate the web-friendly html output

While working on your changes, rather than run make/ make all and create all output formats (which takes a while on slow systems) you can create a single pdf file at one given point size - e.g. make pdf10 to create the 10pt raw pdf.

By default the pdf and pdfc folders each contain 6 files — at different point sizes: 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 & 14pt.

The zip archives can also be recreated separately by pointing make to the zip and zipc targets.

Software dependencies

The build process described above relies on the presence of the following programs:

1. bash (or a compatible shell)
2. GNU make
3. sed
4. pandoc
5. latex/xelatex
6. pdftk
7. imagemagick
8. img2pdf

These tools are either installed by default by current GNU/linux distributions or available from their standard repositories.

The default font used both for the epub and the pdf output is the classic EB Garamond font originally by Austrian designer Georg Mayr-Duffner. This default font can easily be changed to suit your requirements by editing the css style sheet (epub) or the makefile (pdf — cf. the LATEX_FONT variable).

Note, that default values can easily be changed to suit your requirements by editing the variables specified at the beginning of the makefile.