Preparo

Preparo is a Markdown editor designed to prepare texts before book layout or EPUB export. It enables the conversion, structuring, and enrichment of a manuscript by automatically generating the Markdown files, metadata, and bibliography required for the editorial workflow.

It is a lightweight web application built with the Svelte JavaScript framework, designed for structuring Markdown manuscripts for publishing—without requiring any server dependency. It uses an API and a Pandoc server for document conversion (Word, EPUB, PDF), Zotero for bibliographic management, CSL styles for automated citation and footnote formatting, and a Git versioning system to track changes over time. Preparo thus facilitates the structuring, correction, and export of manuscripts to professional publishing pipelines.

• Enriched Markdown editor.
• Clean writing interface, free of unnecessary distractions.
• Support for essential typographic shortcuts (italics, bold, footnotes, blockquotes).

• Automatic detection of level-1 headings (#) to split the manuscript into individual chapters.
• Automatic creation of one .md file per chapter (e.g., 00-preface.md, 01-introduction.md, etc.).
• Generation of a metadata.yaml file including:
  • Title, subtitle, author, translator, publisher, ISBN, rights, description.
  • Ordered list of chapters (input-files).

• Synchronization with a Zotero bibliography (via API or by importing a .bib file).
• Association of a .csl bibliographic style file to format citations and footnotes.
• Use of citeproc-js to preview and apply the CSL style in real time.

• Convert a .docx Word document into clean Markdown using Pandoc.

• All split .md chapter files.
• metadata.yaml file.
• Bibliography file (.bib or .json).
• Associated CSL style file.

• Fully browser-based operation.
• Designed to be easily portable to a Tauri (desktop) version if needed.