[sicher]

I’m halfway through my second novel. Both in very barebones markdown (using pretty much only headings). Plain text is a blessing. I can keep everything in git, searching in emacs with swiper is fantastic (and good search is a must as the material grows) and any tool I lack I can hack together.

[em-bee]

how do you convert from markdown to standard manuscript format which is often required for submissions?

[powersnail]

pandoc is pretty handy. It's pretty much plain text anyway, whatever format is used.

[em-bee]

yup, and here is how to use pandoc to convert to standard manuscript format: http://www.autodidacts.io/convert-markdown-to-standard-manus...

[jonnycomputer]

thank you for this.

huh. looks like i bookmarked this article for followup some time ago, and completely forgot about it.

[jonnycomputer]

but won't get you all the way there, unfortunately, since novel format is pretty specific.

[powersnail]

What are some specific requirements? Aren't most formatting done by the publisher anyway?

[em-bee]

publishers format for print, but the submission needs to be in a specific format too.

this stems from the days where manuscripts were submitted on paper, and not electronically. one could argue that with electronic submission such format requirements are no longer relevant, but we all know that people don't like change.

standard manuscript format looks roughly like this:

lines are double spaced

first line of each paragraph is indented, but there is no space between paragraphs

first page contains contact information and word count.

section headers are centered

each page (except the first) contains a header with: "authors lastname / story title / page #"

[powersnail]

These requirements seem to be easily within pandoc’s ability though, as it can use a reference docx file.