NECRO-THREAD, ARISE FROM THE DEAD!
Now that
this thread is nearly two years dead, has anyone here been using GitBook for a while? Any opinions on it? Still using it, or have you moved on to something else?
I recently re-discovered it due to reading documentation written using GitBook.
I noticed that they recently-ish stopped some of the features that were originally praised in this thread, such as selling your books:
https://www.gitbook....res/sales-deprecatedAnyway, I signed up for an account last night and downloaded the desktop client and started working on converting a reference manual I originally wrote in Google Docs to GitBook format. The client itself is kind of clunky, with some weird behaviors that IMO shouldn't exist in a 2-year old project. But I guess I don't know how long the desktop client has been a thing.
I also really don't like Markdown because of the lack of control I have over basic things, like a simple line return (without a large gap), or making text centered on screen. In fact, I really, really,
really hate how a line return doesn't do anything, but instead just shows content on the same line as the previous content. Ugh! Sometimes I just want a <br> and not a <p>, you know?
But I like the idea of being able to easily publish/export to PDF, or ePub/mobi formats. And I'm curious how that will work out compared to Google Docs. I noticed that when I export my Google Doc as PDF, the resulting PDF doesn't always look exactly like the doc does on my screen in the editor. So all that time I spent meticulously adding line breaks and things to make sure paragraphs and sections wrapped nicely from one page to the next was utterly wasted and made it look even worse on the PDF when, for example, a page only had a single sentence on it and the rest was blank.
In my efforts to compare the differences, I accidentally spent way too long last night fighting with Markdown and figuring out Gitbook, working on the conversion. Once I started getting noticeably tired, I looked at the clock and saw it was past 4 AM. I decided that was enough for one night and went to bed.
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