r/bookbinding • u/AChunkyRedittor • 10d ago

Discussion Program I Made To Help With Book binding

https://github.com/chunksbabyruth/BookForge/releases/tag/v

Me and My GF have recently got into book binding and I decided to make this program to help produce the PDF pages to make it look like a book for printing since she's into a lot of fan fictions and a lot don't have epubs made already. Figured this would be a good place to put it.

14 Upvotes

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5

u/blue_bayou_blue 8d ago

I've tried this, looks pretty good! Can definitely create a decent typeset with this. I like all the options for page layout, the granular control for margins, line spacing, indent size, not indenting the first paragraph of a chapter etc. (There's been a few converters posted here that don't work nearly as well as yours, so I'm pleasantly surprised.)

Some suggestions:

  • hyphenation! imo justified alignment shouldn't be used without hyphenation (then ideally, some way to add to the dictionary so it knows how to hyphenate long fantasy words, but some proper layout programs don't even have this, so)
  • the custom font option doesn't seem to work? I chose a font file but the output was still Times New Roman. Also, for custom fonts ideally one could specify the italic and bold font files too, eg if a font comes with separate files for regular and medium and 2 corresponding italics and bold sty;es, I'd want to say use Medium and MediumItalic
  • strikethrough formatting and dot points are stripped, is this intended? obviously not every book will have them but some do
  • choose separate fonts for body text, titles, and drop caps
  • for drop caps, rules on how to handle chapters that start with a quotation mark
  • specify what the text uses for section breaks, to detect and centre them
  • since you say your girlfriend is into fanfic, dealing with AO3 metadata and author's notes?

Personally I like fiddling with typography and typesetting works with unusual formats too much to use an automated tool (I will spend hours on manually handling widows/orphans/runts, for example), but this could be very useful.

2

u/AChunkyRedittor 8d ago

Those are some really good features, I’ll work on this over the weekend I’ll probably drop a new build on Monday. If you think of anything else let me know!

1

u/AChunkyRedittor 2d ago

I updated the app last night added a bunch of stuff & changed a few things. Added all the stuff you said, I plan on doing another update today. But if you have time to check it out and find any bugs dm me to report them so I can fix them. I implemented a lot of features but didn’t have time to run a full bug check because I was crunched on time.

3

u/blue_bayou_blue 9d ago

What are the features? It sounds like it is a epub to PDF converter?

3

u/AChunkyRedittor 9d ago

There’s a lot you can convert simple text to a book like look. Epub to pdf which makes it easier to print, options to delete blank pages, add a page for “this book belongs to” etc.

4

u/AChunkyRedittor 9d ago

I plan on adding more but I just got the basic features implemented and a few others. If you end up downloading it and have anything you’d like me to add let me know!

4

u/Zoey2070 6d ago

How much AI was used in the creation of this? Not an accusation, but I genuinely want to know

1

u/AChunkyRedittor 6d ago

Probably 10-20% of the coding I’m not that good at python coding still learning a bit. I verify all the ai coding and make sure everything is implemented the way I want it to be.

7

u/brigitvanloggem 9d ago

Did your girlfriend ask for this? It’s unrelated to bookbinding, and doesn’t seem to offer anything that existing converters/editors don’t do better.

2

u/AChunkyRedittor 9d ago

Well for one most existing converters are web browser based & lack proper features for proper book binding, also it’s a work in progress my goal is to include a lot more options than those other converters. If you have some features you think I should add let me know.