sebastiancarlos/hacker-fables

Hacker Fables is a satirical cyberpunk novella, and this repository is both the text of that story and the custom publishing system built to produce it in many formats. If you just want to read the book, the README points you to a hosted website where you can read it online with a synchronized audiobook player, or download it as an EPUB, PDF, MP3 audiobook, MP4 audiobook video, and even as a Unix man page or GNU Info manual, both of which can be read straight from the terminal. What makes this repository interesting from a technical side is the pipeline that turns one single markdown source file into all of those different formats. The pipeline uses Pandoc with custom Lua filters to manipulate the document's structure rather than relying on fragile text replacement, then converts that into an EPUB using a separate library, and produces an automated audiobook by stripping out visual-only content, running the text through a text to speech engine inside Docker, and mapping the generated audio timing back onto the text so the web reader can highlight words as they are spoken. It even generates a video version of the audiobook by taking screenshots of the highlighted text and stitching them together with an audio and video processing tool. The pipeline itself has its own automated test suite. To compile the book yourself, you need Pandoc and a few other command line tools installed, along with Python managed through a tool called uv. A single build script then produces the core outputs, with separate flags to generate the narrated audio version and the video version, each of which needs its own additional setup such as a text to speech installation or a browser automation tool. The license is split: the publishing pipeline code is released under the MIT License, but the actual text of the novella and all of its compiled versions remain fully copyrighted by the author.