Gitbook 📖 is a modern documentation 📃 format and toolchain using Git and Markdown. Supporting Markdown and AsciiDoc syntax, Gitbook is able to output HTML, PDF, eBook, etc.
Git + Markdown
Gitbook is not just a Markdown editing tool or a Git version management tool, it’s more likely to be a document format conversion tool.
There are many Markdown editors available on the market, such as Typora, MacDown, Bear, MarkdownPad, MarkdownX, JetBrains’ IDE (plugins need to be installed), Atom, sketchbook, CSDN, and Gitbook’s own Gitbook Editor.
Since you have noticed this blog, I believe you must have known the advantages (or elegance 😊) of Gitbook. Based on that, I’m going to introduce the usage of Gitbook in a nutshell, to help you start your venture of creating! 🎉
Requirements
Here I use Github + Gitbook Pages + Typora to write a fitness manual 📓 as an example. (You can also use other methods to do the same job, but this seems to be the simplest way I found to build pages on Gitbook.)
Personal Account
Open Gitbook website, you can see a page like this. Click Get Started you can start your creations. Before documenting your thinking, you still need to create an account. Here I strongly recommend using Github to log in, for we will bind a repo with a book in the later. There are some great tricks about writing on Blog, it’s amazing! 🙃
New Workspace
Go to your dashboard, and change the workspace name you want. For me, I want to create a workspace named Fitness Manual. Workspace serves like a collection. You are expected to put similar documents together in a certain workspace. It’s a good manner!
Besides personal account, you can also create organizations by click + on the left top. Your friends, classmates, and colleagues can be in the same workspace in the organization account.
New Book
Cut the cackle! Let’ create a book! 😎
Let me first tell you the icons on the left top.
Content can overview your book process by offering current state, activity, as well as some drafts. 😐
Share is the public (if you set to public your book) version of your book. 😏
Customization helps you customize your book, including icon, name, and domain name. Some themes, colors, and fonts are not free. 😛
Teams is of little use in this part, it majorly exerts its effect in organization account. The team is the derivation of organization, like departments in colleges. So you can see them as organizations in organizations. 👨🏻💻
Integration is a good part, for we can integrate Github into Gitbook. Open the Github integration and link your repo 🔗 . The whole contents in that repo can be saved in your Gitbook automatically. The advantage of such trick is you can archive your articles twice. Some legacy parts are hard to adapt to the new version. Linking with Github repository, you can easily immigrate your books to new version Gitbook.
Initialization will help you add an Introduction in your new book. Update your repo and add some articles on Github, effects will show on Gitbook as well!
Here’s Nino’s Fitness Manual in Chinese (🇨🇳). Welcome! 🎉
