Book Studio

Turn a folder of Markdown notes into a print-ready paperback PDF for Amazon KDP and an EPUB 3 for every ebook store. Everything happens on your device: your manuscript is never uploaded anywhere.

No Pandoc, no LaTeX, nothing else to install, and it works on Obsidian mobile too.

Try it in your browser → The web app opens with a sample book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, already typeset.

Book Studio comes in two forms that share one engine and one interface:

• An Obsidian plugin. It works on the vault you write in, rebuilds the preview as you type and saves exports to a vault folder.
• A web app. Open a folder of Markdown files, such as your vault, in the browser. Nothing is uploaded.

Book Studio is free. This first version prints 6" × 9" paperbacks in the Classic and Modern themes and exports EPUB 3; more trims and themes are on the way.

Features

• One note is the book. A manifest note lists the chapters as links, in order, under Front matter, Chapters and Back matter. Its properties hold the title, author, theme and trim. To reorder chapters, reorder the links.
• Real typesetting. Knuth–Plass line breaking, hyphenation in the book's language, smart quotes and dashes, old-style figures and small caps where the theme calls for them. Widows and orphans are avoided.
• Themes with character. Drop caps, ornamental scene breaks, chapter openers, part pages and running heads. Themes: Classic and Modern.
• Ready for KDP.
  • The 6" × 9" trim, the most common paperback size.
  • Inside margins that grow with the page count, as KDP requires.
  • Optional bleed, embedded fonts, chapters that open on a right-hand page, and padding to KDP's 24-page minimum.
  • The spine width is reported for your cover designer.
• Front and back matter, built for you. Half title, title page, copyright page (with ISBNs, edition and publisher), dedication, epigraph and table of contents, plus "Also by" and any notes you list.
• Live paged preview. Each page appears exactly as it will print. Zoom to fit the page or the width, and check facing pages side by side.
• EPUB 3 for every store. Semantic XHTML, a navigable table of contents and landmarks, embedded fonts, the cover, and the book's language on every page. Exports pass EPUBCheck with no messages.
• Problems tab. Broken links, missing images and chapters that can't be found are listed with the note and line they come from; in Obsidian, a click opens it.

Writing a book

Create a note with book: true in its properties. That note is the manifest:

---
book: true
title: The Lighthouse Keeper
subtitle: A Novel
author: Jane Doe
language: en
publisher: Harbor Press
isbn: 978-1-23456-789-7
ebook-isbn: 978-1-23456-790-3
copyright: "© 2026 Jane Doe. All rights reserved."
dedication: For my mother.
cover: images/cover.jpg
theme: classic
trim: 6x9
---

## Front matter
- [[Foreword]]

## Chapters
### Part One: The Sea
1. [[The Storm]]
2. [[Landfall|The Shore]]
3. ~~[[Cut Scene]]~~
### Part Two: The Light
4. [[The Keeper]]
5. [[Interlude]] unnumbered

%% Ideas for later:
- [[Sequel hook]]
%%

## Back matter
- [[Acknowledgments]]
- [[About the Author]]

• Sections. Links under Front matter, Chapters and Back matter go to those parts of the book. Section names in other languages work too ("Capítulos", "Kapitel", "Chapitres").
• Parts. A subheading inside Chapters starts a part, which gets its own part page.
• Titles. A chapter's title comes from the link alias ([[Landfall|The Shore]]), then the note's title property, then the file name. Leading numbers in file names, such as "01 The Cyclone", are dropped.
• Drafts and comments. A struck-out link is left out of the build. Anything inside %% … %% is ignored.
• Unnumbered chapters. Write unnumbered after a link, or set numbered: false in the chapter note. Front and back matter are never numbered.
• Starting from a folder. In Obsidian, Create book from current folder writes a manifest that lists the folder's notes.

Chapter notes are ordinary Markdown:

• Scene breaks. * * *, ***, --- or # # # on a line of its own become the theme's ornament.
• Images. ![[map.png|A hand-drawn map of the island]] uses the alias as the image description. Write decorative as the alias for an image that carries no meaning.
• Footnotes, block quotes, lists, tables and poetry are all supported. For poetry, keep the line breaks.

Manifest properties

The studio's toolbar can override the theme and trim for a single export without editing the note.

Privacy

• Your notes, images and exports never leave your device. Parsing, typesetting and PDF and EPUB generation all run locally.
• The plugin makes no network requests. The web app loads only its own files (the sample book and fonts) from the site it is served from. There is no account, no telemetry, no analytics and no ads.
• The plugin keeps its settings in its data.json in your vault. The web app keeps them in your browser's local storage.

Installing

Obsidian

Search for Book Studio under Settings → Community plugins → Browse. To install by hand instead:

1. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Copy main.js, manifest.json and styles.css into <your vault>/.obsidian/plugins/book-studio/.
3. Enable Book Studio under Settings → Community plugins.

Open the studio from the ribbon icon or the command palette. The commands are Open studio, Export print PDF, Export EPUB and Create book from current folder. Exports are saved to the folder chosen in settings, Book Studio exports by default. The plugin works on desktop and mobile and needs Obsidian 1.7.2 or later.

Web app

Open the web app and choose Open a folder to load your own notes. To host it yourself, npm run build:web writes a static site to dist/web/ that any static host can serve.

Development

npm install
npm run build          # plugin (main.js, styles.css)
npm run build:all      # plugin and web app
npm run build:web      # just the web app
npm run dev            # unminified builds with source maps
npm run typecheck
npm run lint           # ESLint with Obsidian's plugin review rules
npm test               # Vitest: parsing, layout, EPUB, audit
npm run sample         # render the sample book to out/ from the command line

npm run sample runs the same pipeline from Node, which helps when checking output:

npm run sample -- path/to/folder
npm run sample -- --theme modern --out out/oz-modern

Layout

src/engine/    Parsing, typesetting, PDF, EPUB and checks (no DOM, no Obsidian)
src/app/       The studio UI shared by both hosts: toolbar, preview, export dialogs
src/preview/   Canvas renderer for the paged preview
src/obsidian/  Plugin entry: view, commands, settings, vault access
src/web/       Web app entry: folder picker, downloads, local storage
tests/         Vitest suites
tools/         Command-line renderer
sample/oz/     The sample book
fonts/         Bundled typefaces

Credits and licenses

• Book Studio is released under the MIT License.
• The bundled fonts are under the SIL Open Font License 1.1: EB Garamond, Crimson Pro, Cormorant Garamond, Montserrat, Atkinson Hyperlegible and Inconsolata.
• The text of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (L. Frank Baum, 1900) is in the public domain. The sample's cover and illustration were made for this project and are under the MIT License.
• Libraries: pdf-lib, fontkit, JSZip, marked, yaml and hyphen.