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This book is available in one of two ways:
These are both produced from the same source code available at https://github.com/ts4z/barge-rulebook/.
This document is primarily written with mdbook, which produces a group of nice, easy-to-navigate web pages. The text is written in the Markdown format, which is easy to write and easy to read even if you don't understand the technical bits.
A GitHub workflow is used to build the rulebook into the
version hosted at barge.org. GitHub (and the
underlying git utility) provide our version control.
We also have a PDF version produced by converting the mdbook/Markdown files into LaTeX. When we did the 2024 rulebook, we discovered mdbook's PDF support just wasn't as good as our previous LaTeX version. So now, we have a small perl script that extracts the file list from the mdbook configuration, uses CommonMark (a Markdown library) to produce LaTeX, then doctors that up with some minor hacks and renders it to PDF.
All of the tools are common free software except the perl script and
build glue, which is included in the git repository.