AutomaticBook - Spectral Docs

Automated book creation for Adobe InDesign

Quick Start

Drop a manuscript folder (or ZIP) into the app
The folder must contain a manifest.yaml and a metadata.yaml
Choose your InDesign version in Settings
Click Generate Book

The app will launch InDesign, create all documents from your templates, inject Markdown content, and assemble the final book.

Manuscript Structure

Your manuscript folder should follow this layout:

manuscript/
  manifest.yaml
  metadata.yaml
  assets/
    cover.jpg
  texts/
    01-titlepage.md
    02-copyright-page.md
    03-chapter-1.md
    ...

manifest.yaml

Defines the order and type of each text file:

version: 1
metadata: metadata.yaml
texts:
  - file: texts/01-titlepage.md
    type: frontmatter
  - file: texts/03-chapter-1.md
    type: bodymatter
  - file: texts/12-bibliography.md
    type: backmatter
output: ../build/InDesign

metadata.yaml

Book metadata (title, author, ISBN, etc.) used to fill template placeholders like {{TITLE}}, {{AUTHOR}}, {{ISBN_PRINT}}.

Templates

InDesign templates (.indd) are auto-detected in a template/ folder near your manuscript:

titlepage.indd — always first in the book
frontmatter.indd — fallback for frontmatter entries
bodymatter.indd — fallback for body entries (chapters)
backmatter.indd — fallback for backmatter entries
endpage.indd — always last in the book
cover.indd — generated separately, outside the book

Specialized templates (e.g. bibliography.indd, toc.indd) are matched by keyword in the Markdown filename.

Template Placeholders

Place these tags in your InDesign templates — BookCreator will replace them with values from metadata.yaml.

Text placeholders

Placeholder	Metadata field	Description
`{{TITLE}}`	`title`	Book title
`{{SUBTITLE}}`	`subtitle`	Book subtitle
`{{AUTHOR}}`	`author`	Author name
`{{PUBLISHER}}`	`publisher`	Publisher name
`{{ISBN_PRINT}}`	`isbn-print`	Print ISBN
`{{ISBN_EBOOK}}`	`isbn-ebook`	E-book ISBN
`{{ISSN}}`	`issn`	ISSN number
`{{PRINT_DATE}}`	`print-date`	Publication date
`{{LANG}}`	`language`	Book language
`{{PLACE}}`	`place`	Place of publication
`{{SERIE}}`	`serie`	Series / collection name
`{{PRICE}}`	`price`	Retail price
`{{RIGHTS}}`	`rights`	Copyright / rights notice

Optional placeholders — the entire line is removed if the field is empty

Placeholder	Metadata field	Description
`{{ORIGINAL_TITLE}}`	`original-title`	Original title (for translations). Can include a label prefix.
`{{TRANSLATOR}}`	`translator`	Translator name
`{{CRITICAL}}`	`critical`	Critical edition / editor
`{{COVER_NOTE}}`	`cover-credit`	Cover image credit. Can include a label prefix.
`{{DEDICATION}}`	`dedication`	Dedication text
`{{EDITIONS}}`	`editions`	Previous editions
`{{FUNDING}}`	`funding`	Funding / grant acknowledgements

Special placeholders

Placeholder	Description
`{{DOCUMENT_TITLE}}`	Automatically replaced with the first `# Heading 1` extracted from the Markdown content injected into the document (or the `shorttitle` field if present).
`{{EAN13_PRINT}}`	Draws an EAN-13 barcode from the print ISBN. The placeholder must be inside a rectangle frame — it will be replaced by the generated barcode graphic.
`{{EAN13_EBOOK}}`	Same as above, but for the e-book ISBN.

In addition, title and author are also created as InDesign text variables (Book Title and Book Author), usable in headers/footers.

Micro-typography

When the micro-typography checkbox is enabled, SuperScript runs automatically after book generation to apply language-specific typographic corrections:

Thin/non-breaking spaces before punctuation (: ; ! ?)
Dash normalization (em dash → en dash)
Smart quotes and apostrophes
Ellipsis (... → …)
Century formatting (XIVe), ordinals, number formatting

Select the language profile matching your book’s language.

Install Scripts Manually

Click Install scripts in InDesign to copy the three scripts into InDesign’s Scripts Panel:

BookCreator Automated book generation from YAML + templates
Markdown-Import Convert Markdown to styled InDesign text
SuperScript Multilingual typographic correction

After installation, access them via Window → Utilities → Scripts in InDesign.

Supported Markdown

Markdown-Import handles the following syntax in your text files:

# Heading 1 through ###### Heading 6
**bold**, *italic*, ***bold italic***
~~strikethrough~~, ^superscript^, ~subscript~
> blockquote
- bullet list
![alt](image.jpg) — images with optional captions
| table | syntax | — Markdown tables
[^1]: footnote — real InDesign footnotes
Pandoc attributes: [text]{.class}, ::: {.class} :::

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