Buckyverse
Works

Making an Ebook

A process and tooling guide — not a Fuller book — documenting how the project transforms physical books into high-quality ebooks. It covers the digitization workflow and the toolchain: hardware/scanning, WebStorm as editor, Pandoc for conversion, TeX Live (MacTeX), and Kindle Previewer.

Updated 2026-06-27 medium confidence cold

Making an Ebook

Notes on how to transform a physical book into its best digital self, so it makes the trip to Mars and lives on forever.

Core structure

  • Digital Translation to Ebook
  • Hardware
  • WebStorm (IntelliJ)
  • Pandoc
  • TeX Live (MacTeX)
  • Kindle Previewer

Main ideas

  • The goal is to transform a physical book into its best digital self for long-term preservation.
  • Scanning began with the idea of building an "Archivist Quill."
  • WebStorm (IntelliJ) serves as the text editor / IDE of choice.
  • Pandoc is the "Babel Fish" of text documents, handling format conversion.
  • Producing TeX documents requires installing a TeX environment (TeX Live / MacTeX); Kindle Previewer checks the output.

Why it matters

This is the project's tooling and workflow reference — the practical pipeline behind turning Fuller's out-of-print volumes into faithful, durable ebooks. It records the hardware and software choices (scanning, WebStorm, Pandoc, TeX Live, Kindle Previewer) that the rest of the corpus depends on.

See Also

Sources

  • making_an_ebook/ — process project directory (repo-local source tree)
  • making_an_ebook/index.md — synthesis index for the process project
  • making_an_ebook/ebook-process.md — the ebook production workflow
  • making_an_ebook/regex.md — regex notes for text cleanup
  • making_an_ebook/comic_books.md — notes on comic-book digitization