Metadata

Three fields at the top of the Configure tab allow you to specify metadata for your project, which is used in the production of ebooks.

Files to Build

The Files section allows you to select which files should be included in your builds and to determine their order in output.

On the left, you'll see a list of files in your project that are eligible to be built. Atlas only recognizes directories and files with the following file extensions in this pane: .html, .xml, .asciidoc, .adoc, and .asc.

The right-hand Build Contents pane shows you the files Atlas will include when you build. You can drag files from left to right by clicking on them in the Project Files pane or remove them from your build list by clicking on the "⊖" icon. You can also reorder the files in your build list by dragging and dropping them however you'd like. When you're done, click the "Save Settings" button below the Build Contents pane.

Theme

Atlas themes are collections of CSS and XSL files that determine the styling of your output formats.

Generic "Trade" and "Technical" themes are provided as a default in the Themes section. O'Reilly editorial or production staff can provide paths to custom themes for O'Reilly book series.

PDF

The PDF format is a fixed-layout rendering of your project. The content is split into static pages that do not change with the viewscreen, as in a printed book.

Atlas offers you the option to either create a print-ready PDF, or to create a web PDF optimized for reading on the screen. O'Reilly sends the Print version PDF to printers when a project has finished production. You can choose which type of PDF you'd like in the PDF Settings tab.

EPUB

EPUB is the main file format used by e-reader devices as well as the O'Reilly Learning Platform. Unlike a PDF, the EPUBs created by Atlas are reflowable—this means that users can change things like text sizes and margins, and the content will reflow across the "pages" of the device.

EPUB is a standard maintained by the W3C Publishing Working Group. In order to make it easier for device makers (like Apple) and publishers (like O'Reilly) to build compatible products, the EPUB standard defines a number of rules about how the content should be encoded. All O'Reilly EPUB products are compliant with the EPUB standard.

MOBI

Amazon's Kindle devices and apps have their own proprietary ebook format, called MOBI. Amazon now creates their MOBIs in-house from EPUBs, so this build option is deprecated.

HTML

When you build HTML for a project, you’ll be able to download a zip file of the project files, CSS, and images. This can be useful for debugging or saving the project files locally.

Table of Contents

Each build format offers the option to generate a table of contents based on your project chapter titles and headings. This saves you from having to manually update your table of contents every time the content gets restructured or a title changes. Atlas will build a table of contents for you by automatically pulling together a nested list of all your chapter-level titles, as well as the first two levels of headings.

There are two steps to successfully generating a TOC:

1. Enable TOC generation. You can do this under "Configure" for the format(s) you're trying to build, or directly in atlas.json as explained in the JSON section.
2. Add a <nav data-type="toc"/> placeholder tag in your content. This tag needs to be a root tag in your content—that means that it needs to be in a file, all on its own, and cannot be nested inside a chapter or in a <section> tag. Usually, this file is called toc.html.

Index

Each build format supports the option to generate a back-of-the-book index. There are three steps to successfully generating an index:

1. Enable index generation. You can do this under "Configure".
2. Add a <section data-type="index"/> placeholder tag in your content. This tag needs to be a root tag in your content—that means that it needs to be in a file, all on its own, and cannot be nested inside a chapter or in another <section> tag. Usually, this file is called ix.html.
3. Add index tags where appropriate in the content. This is done by a professional indexer during the production phase of an O'Reilly book project.

Files

files is an array listing the files to build in the order you'd like them sequenced in your book. All of these files need to exist in the repository and should be referenced with relative paths from the atlas.json file.

{
  "files" : [
    "chapter1.html",
    "chapter2.html"
  ]
}

Optional Fields

{
  "branch": "master"
}

{
  "title": "Your title here"
}

{
  "theme" : "oreillymedia/animal_theme_sass"
}

{
  "formats" : {
    "pdf" : {
      "option" : "value"
    }
  }
}

    "pdf": {
      "version": "print",
      "color_count": "1",
      "index": true,
      "toc": true,
      "syntaxhighlighting": true,
      "show_comments": false,
      "trim_size": "7inx9.1875in",
      "antennahouse_version": "AHFormatterV62_64-MR4"
    }