The format's main focus is simplicity and readability.
GitBook uses a convention on top of markdown files.
A book is a Git repository containing at least 2 files: README.md and SUMMARY.md.
Typically, this should be the introduction for your book. It will be automatically added to the final summary.
The SUMMARY.md defines your book's structure. It should contain a list of chapters and sub-chapters, linking to their respective pages.
Example:
# Summary
This is the summary of my book.
* [section 1](section1/README.md)
* [example 1](section1/example1.md)
* [example 2](section1/example2.md)
* [section 2](section2/README.md)
* [example 1](section2/example1.md)
Files that are not included in SUMMARY.md will not be processed by GitBook.
GitBook supports building books written in multiple languages. Each language should be a sub-directory following the normal GitBook format, and a file named LANGS.md should be present at the root of the repository with the following format:
* [English](en/)
* [French](fr/)
* [Español](es/)
You can see a complete example with the Learn Git book.
Allows you to specify terms and their respective definitions to be displayed in the glossary. Based on those terms, gitbook will automatically build an index and highlight those terms in pages.
The GLOSSARY.md format is very simple :
# term
Definition for this term
# Another term
With it's definition, this can contain bold text and all other kinds of inline markup ...
GitBook will read the .gitignore, .bookignore and .ignore files to get a list of files and folders to skip. (The format inside those files, follows the same convention as .gitignore)