Tome is a lightweight markup language and associated command-line tool suite designed for writing novels and other chapter-based books.
Developed by Brian Mearns, Tome focuses on manuscripts consisting primarily of prose rather than documents requiring complex page layouts or extensive mathematical notation.
Authors prepare their manuscripts in plain-text files using the editor of their choice. Tome’s markup describes the manuscript’s structural elements, while its processing tools handle conversion into formats suitable for publication.
The language deliberately limits the amount of formatting control available to the author. It does not provide the extensive customisation facilities found in general-purpose typesetting languages. The intention is to separate the text of a manuscript from decisions about its final presentation.
Tome supports several representations of document content, including XML, Tome-OTL and Tome-Flow. These provide different ways of expressing or processing the same underlying document structure.
The tool suite can generate EPUB files for ebook publication and LaTeX files for use with conventional typesetting tools. LaTeX output can be processed further to obtain PDF and other publication formats.
Tome is particularly suited to prose manuscripts whose structure is relatively simple and whose final formatting will be handled separately from the original text.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Plain-text manuscript authoring.
- Chapter-based document organisation.
- Compact structural markup for prose documents.
- Block quotations spanning multiple paragraphs.
- Footnotes and supporting references.
- Preformatted passages preserving their source layout.
- XML representation of document structure.
- Tome-OTL and Tome-Flow input syntaxes.
- Conversion between supported document representations.
- EPUB generation for ebook readers.
- LaTeX generation for typesetting workflows.
- Plain-text document output.
- Command-line manuscript processing.
Website: bitbucket.org/bmearns/tome
Support:
Developer: Brian Mearns
License: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
Tome is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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| Textile | Billed as a "humane web text generator" |
| Texy | Text-to-XHTML formatter and converter library |
| Tome | Markup Language and Tool Suite for Authors |
| reStructuredText | Markup Syntax and Parser Component of Docutils |
| Haml | Templating engine for HTML |
| JsonML | Map between XML and JSON |
| TOML | Tom’s Obvious Minimal Language |
| Djot | Light markup language inspired by CommonMark |
| Org-mode | Plain text markup for notes, documents, and workflows |
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