Rodman/Pottinger Cookbook Project

This is a collection of recipes we use on a regular basis, and will hopefully be used to produce a family cookbook, if I keep my act together this year. TLDR, if you're just here for recipes, you can find them in the recipes folder.

Software/Specs Used

• RecipeMD: for the excellent markdown recipe format, and a few nice tools.
• Cookie: for quickly creating a new recipe
• Pandoc: for converting recipes into PDF, EPUB, HTML, and DOCX files
• poppler-utils: for its handy pdfunite tool to assemble the cover, content, and grocery list into the final PDF
• Scribus: for typesetting the cover page (static .sla source, exported as Coverpage.pdf)
• XeLaTeX: PDF generation engine via Pandoc; also used to render the versioned cover at build time
• Wikiti Pandoc Book Template

Getting Started

This project includes a Devbox configuration, to help you get a development environment going.

Steps to get the cookbook running on your local machine, with Devbox

1. Make sure Devbox is installed
2. devbox shell downloads requirements and launches a devbox development environment
3. skip down to the "how to use" section for commands you can run

NOTE: The first time you run devbox shell may take a while to complete due to Devbox downloading prerequisites and package catalogs required by Nix. This delay is a one-time cost, and future invocations and package additions should resolve much faster.

How to Use

The Makefile is based on the Wikiti Pandoc Book Template, with significant customization for this project.

Available Targets

Target	Description
make pdf	Build cookbook.pdf — the main content PDF (no cover). Easiest for navigating by page number.
make epub	Build cookbook.epub with cross-chapter link resolution and page-reference stripping.
make html	Build cookbook.html (single-page HTML, page refs stripped).
make docx	Build cookbook.docx for Word.
make final	Assemble the full print-ready PDF: versioned cover + content + grocery list → RodmanPottingerFamilyCookbook.pdf.
make release	Auto-bump semver version from latest git tag, build all formats, create a git tag, and publish a GitHub release with artifacts.
make check	Validate all RecipeMD files and check horizontal-rule formatting.
make stats	Show cookbook statistics (recipe count, word count, PDF pages, git info).
make clean	Remove the build/ directory.

Versioning

Versions follow semver. The current version is set in VERSION in the Makefile, or derived from git tags when running make release. The version appears on:

• The cover page: generated at build time from scripts/generate-cover.tex, showing the version and build date (e.g. 3.0.0 — 2026-06-09)
• The title page: in the metadata line below the title

make release           # auto-bump patch → v3.0.0, build, tag, release
make release VERSION=4.0.0  # explicit version override

Cross-References

Recipes can use \label{name} (on its own line, typically after the attribution) and \pageref{name} in the text to create cross-references. For example:

\label{biga}

See the [Biga starter](./Biga.md) recipe for details (see page \pageref{biga}).

• PDF: rendered as native LaTeX cross-references (correct page numbers after multiple passes)
• EPUB/HTML: \pageref text is stripped; links to other recipe files are rewritten as HTML anchors. A post-processing step (scripts/fix-epub-links.py) resolves cross-chapter fragment links in EPUB output.

Cover Page

The cover is generated fresh on every make final or make release build:

1. The cover image is extracted from Coverpage.pdf (exported from Coverpage.sla in Scribus)
2. A LaTeX template (scripts/generate-cover.tex) renders the image with the centered version + build date overlay
3. pdfunite assembles cover + content + GroceryList.pdf into the final PDF

To update the cover design, edit Coverpage.sla in Scribus and re-export to Coverpage.pdf.

Proofreading

Several make targets help catch common RecipeMD errors:

Target	Description
make check	Full RecipeMD validation + HR formatting check
make find-missing-units	Find ingredient quantities missing units (e.g. 1* instead of *1 T*)
make find-repeated-words	Find duplicate words (e.g. the the)
make find-missing-attribution	List recipes with tags but no Source: line
make check-hr-formatting	Verify blank lines around horizontal rules
make find-adjective-titles	Find titles starting with an adjective (alphabetization check)
make proofread	Run all proofreading checks at once

Handy Proofreading tips

For most proofreading tasks, use make proofread to run all checks at once, or refer to the individual targets in the table above. Some raw command alternatives:

• ack "[1-9]\*" — find ingredient quantities missing units (alias for make find-missing-units)
• ack --ignore-file ext:css "\b([a-zA-Z]+'?[a-zA-Z]+)\s+\1\b" — find repeated words like the the
• grep -Pzl '(?s)^#[^\n]*\n\n\*.*\*' recipes/*.md — list recipes missing Source: lines
• grep -Pzol '(?s)(?<!\n)\n---\n(?!.*---\n)' recipes/*.md — find HRs without blank lines around them