Rodman/Pottinger Cookbook Project

This is a collection of recipes we use on a regular basis, and will hopefully be used to produce a family cookbook, if I keep my act together this year. TLDR, if you're just here for recipes, you can find them in the recipes folder.

Software/Specs Used

• RecipeMD: for the excellent markdown recipe format, and a few nice tools.
• Cookie: for quickly creating a new recipe
• Pandoc: for converting recipes into PDF files
• poppler-utilsa: for its handy pdf-unite tool, so I can slap the coverpage on the final PDF of the cookbook.
• Scribus: for general typesetting of book pages
• Wikiti Pandoc Book Template

Getting Started

This project includes a Devbox configuration, to help you get a development environment going.

Steps to get the cookbook running on your local machine, with Devbox

1. Make sure Devbox is installed
2. devbox shell downloads requirements and launches a devbox development environment
3. skip down to the "how to use" section for commands you can run

NOTE: The first time you run devbox shell may take a while to complete due to Devbox downloading prerequisites and package catalogs required by Nix. This delay is a one-time cost, and future invocations and package additions should resolve much faster.

How to Use

The Makefile is from the Wikiti Pandoc Book Template, the docs there are good, but, here's a terse bit of suggestions:

make pdf will generate the basic cookbook.pdf file, and this is the easiest to navigate because the page count matches the page numbers, so jumping to the correct page from the TOC is pretty straightforward, and doesn't involve any math.

make final assembles the entire cookbook, including the coverpage, into a single PDF file, suitable for printing.

I haven't yet tried any of the other targets in the Makefile.

Eventually there will be a make release which will tag a new release on GitHub, and upload the final version of the cookbook, for a new edition. But, that work remains to be done.

Handy Proofreading tips

ack "[1-9]\*" is a good way to find a common typo in a recipe, it's easy to forget to include the units inside the *1 T * markup for quantity of ingredients... That ack search will find those mistakes, so you can fix them.

ack --ignore-file ext:css "\b([a-zA-Z]+'?[a-zA-Z]+)\s+\1\b" is a good way to find repeated words, like the dreaded the the.

grep -Pzl '(?s)^#[^\n]*\n\n\*.*\*' *.md when run inside the recipes folder, will give you a list of the recipes that are missing attribution lines.

grep -Pzol '(?s)(?<!\n)\n---\n(?!.*---\n)' *.md when run inside the recipes folder, will give you a list of the recipes that do not have blank lines around the horizontal rules in them, which is a very common error for recipemd files.