Help w/markdown formatting

[dazzaji]

Saw this on Hacker News today. Good stuff! It seems like you’re open to PRs with format and spelling fixes [1][2]. At a scan it looked like a lot of the fixes from the .doc conversion are needed from the section “EASY DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE WINS” through the conclusion. I was starting to volunteer some fixes but it frequently isn’t clear what the desired formatting should be. If you’d be willing to add the .doc to the repo, I’d be happy to use that as the target format and offer fixes through PRs.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37971795#37973166

[2] “As of October 2023 I'm still working on porting the book content into markdown. Everything is in there (via a .doc to .md auto-converter) but the formatting is all over the place and needs a lot of cleanup still, apologies for my mess in the interrum!”

[ZachGoldberg]

Awesome, appreciate the offer of help! I'll push some binaries up momentarily

[ZachGoldberg]

Just added published_files with a .doc and .pdf version -- the PDF was what was QA'd most closely with my editor/publisher, the .doc was an export from indesign, so I imagine the PDF is ultimately more reliable.

[dazzaji]

Got it! https://github.com/ZachGoldberg/Startup-CTO-Handbook/blob/main/published_files/Oct16thFinal.pdf

I’ll endeavor to lend a hand in the coming days.

[mb21]

Has anybody tried running https://pandoc.org on the doc file?

pandoc input.docx -o output.md

[pferretti]

If useful, I'm sharing the steps with Pandoc if you want to create an EPUB. You need to create a .txt like this:

---
title: The Startup CTO's Handbook
author: Zach Goldberg
rights:  Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0
language: en-US
...

and next you can execute

pandoc -o "The startup CTO Handbook.epub" title.txt StartupCTOHandbook.md

The resulting EPUB is well formatted. I opened it with Apple Books and it seems ok, with the right references to the index, chapters, etc...