gutterpress

Write a book in Markdown. Lay it out with CSS. Export a print-ready PDF. gutterpress is a desktop app, with a CLI for scripting, that turns a folder of Markdown files into a professionally typeset PDF: the kind you'd send to an offset printer or a print-on-demand service. Built by Dimm City, the studio behind the tabletop RPG of the same name.

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A book at a glance

A project is a folder with a manifest, your chapters and a stylesheet. The manifest names the files and the page size; CSS does the rest.

title: "My Book"
authors:
  - "Jane Doe"
preset: book          # a 6×9in trade book
styles:
  - styles/book.css
source:
  files:
    - 01-introduction.md
    - 02-chapter-two.md

Core concepts

Markdown in

Chapters are plain Markdown files. A few directives (@chapter, @page, @section) handle breaks and columns.

CSS for layout

Page size, margins, bleed, running headers, page numbers and columns are all CSS Paged Media, the W3C spec for print.

Chromium out

The preview and the PDF come from the same print engine, so what you see while editing is what prints.

Print-ready

PDF/X output with CMYK and an ICC profile, plus checks for image DPI, colour space and font embedding.

Why gutterpress?

Desktop publishing tools lock your book inside a proprietary file. Word processors fight you on every page break. gutterpress keeps the text as Markdown in a folder you own, and the design as a stylesheet you can read, diff and share.

A layout app

One big binary file, one person's machine, manual page breaks.

vs

gutterpress

Markdown and CSS in git, built the same way every time, in CI if you like.

Also in the box

Plugins and looks

Any markdown-it plugin works. Add a bundled look, or publish your own, with gutterpress ext add.

Publishing targets

Presets for DriveThruRPG and trade books, and a guide to itch.io, KDP and the rest.

CI-friendly CLI

A single binary that builds the same PDF in GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or Docker.