Tech Tuesday: Roll Your Own Writing System, part 5: Reuse

The series rolls on…

In Part 1, we had a look at Markdown and the five or six formatting symbols that cover 97% of written fiction. Part 2, showed how you can use Markdown without leaving the comfort of Scrivener. Part 3 began exploring eBook publishing using files generated from both Scrivener and directly from MultiMarkdown. Part 4 provided a brief overview to a different tool called Pandoc that can convert your output to a wider variety of formats, and is one way to create print documents for beta readers or even production.

Way back in Part 2, we used Scrivener to embed HTML separators between scenes and for internal scene breaks. As we saw last week, that doesn’t work when you need to output to a different format. As it turns out, there’s a way to work around that by using MultiMarkdown’s transclusion mechanism. Transclusion and metadata variables provide the capability for reuse, pulling common boilerplate files from a library.

Inclusion… Transclusion?

Transclusion is a technical term, but it’s easy enough to explain. You use it to embed another Markdown file into your document, like you might include a graphics file. A function like this is essential when you’re maintaining a collection of technical documents, because you can reuse common sections or passages—write them once, store them in a library of common files, and then changing one of the source documents automatically updates all the documents that use it. For fiction writing, it’s a good way to pull in all those boilerplate files (about the author, front matter, etc.) that you need for each book.

To transclude a boilerplate file, put this on its own line:

{{myfile.md}}

When you run multimarkdown, it pulls in the contents of myfile.md and processes it.

Now here’s where it gets fun. Say you really need to be able to output to both HTML and OpenOffice. Instead of embedding HTML that gets ignored in the OpenOffice conversion, or vice versa, you can use a wildcard:

{{myfile.*}}

Now, when you output to HTML, multimarkdown transcludes the file myfile.html. When you want OpenOffice, it uses myfile.fodt. You just have to supply the files with the right extensions and content, and you’re off to the races! You can use this in the Separators in Scrivener to choose the right markup for your output.

A few caveats for fodt transclusion: You cannot use entities like • or ὚ to specify special characters. You have to enter them as characters. If you only have one line to add, you don’t need to put any OpenOffice markup in the fodt file—plain text is fine, but use the right extension so multimarkdown knows which file to use.

If you want to reuse transcluded files with other documents, you can add another line to the metadata:

Transclude Base: /path/to/your/files

You can use a relative path like ../boilerplate, but it’s safer to specify the entire path in case you move the file to some other location.

Does the Front Matter?

But transcluding boilerplate files is only the beginning. Especially for front matter, you need to change at least the title for each book. Fortunately, MultiMarkdown has that covered.

In Scrivener’s Compile window, the last entry is Meta-Data. Back in Part 3, you used this to specify a CSS file for HTML output. Scrivener pre-fills entries for the Title and Author, but you can add anything else you want here. All the metadata ends up at the beginning of the file, where MultiMarkdown can process it further.

So you might have a block that looks like this:

Title: Beyond All Recognition
Subtitle: The Foobar Chronicles, Book 1
Author: Marcus Downs
Copyright: 2017
Publisher: High Press UR

Create a title page that looks like this (for HTML output):

<div style="text-align:center" markdown="1">
**[%title]**

**[%subtitle]**

by  
[%author]

Copyright [%copyright] [%author]. All rights reserved.

Published by [%publisher]
</div>

![](logo.png)

{{TOC}}

Instant front matter! The {{TOC}} construct inserts a table of contents, another Multimarkdown feature.

Now What?

Now you know how to include boilerplate files in your book, and how to automatically put the right text in each output format.

Next week… it’s something completely different to wrap up the series.