DJ Speckhals, an indie novelist and software developer, published Prince of Savoy in 2025 through a workflow that any architect tired of Autodesk renewal emails will recognise: Microsoft Word as the manuscript “source of truth,” Adobe InDesign for print typesetting, Calibre for EPUB, Amazon’s Kindle Create for the proprietary KFX. Each change to a sentence meant updating four files in four programs across two operating systems. On 22 May 2026 he published a post titled How I bypassed Adobe and Microsoft to build a Git-tracked book production pipeline. The interesting move is not the toolchain; it is the topology.

←TODAY: Typst is GA in 2026, Pandoc compiles to EPUB and print-ready PDF, KDP and IngramSpark accept both — and Adobe Creative Cloud remains a recurring subscription. →3012: By Zurich-3012, a discipline that owns its source files is a discipline that still exists; the rest are licensed leaseholders. Fulcrum: A book and a building are the same artefact — both have a source of truth, both want to be diffable, and both die when the vendor does.

Speckhals’s old dependency graph had a binary DOCX at the root, fanning into three closed-format leaves — INDD, EPUB, KFX — each demanding a license, a UI, and a different export ritual. The new graph rotates the spine ninety degrees: plain-text Markdown lives in Git, John MacFarlane’s Pandoc routes the conversions, Typst — the Rust-based typesetter shipped GA in 2026 out of TU Berlin by Martin Haug and Laurenz Mädje — handles print PDF, and the same source compiles to EPUB without touching Adobe. Standard Ebooks, the volunteer project he credits for the discipline, ships its style guide as a linter: Illegal unit used to set font-size. Hint: Use em units. That is exactly the contract a CI job needs to verify on every push.

Atelier: This is a topology lesson, not a publishing lesson. Architects who have already pulled an IFC4 model out of a Speckle stream, or who watched a Bonsai-based render survive a teammate’s lapsed Revit seat, recognise Speckhals’s diagram instantly — subscription rails are quiet single points of failure. Draw your real dependency graph this week, not the architecture diagram but the dependency graph, and find the third Autodesk-shaped node you forgot was there.

Hack: This Hack teaches you to compile a Markdown manuscript into a print-ready PDF using a one-line Makefile target — the smallest “writer pipeline” that already escapes Adobe and Word. Drop a few chapter-*.md files into a src/ directory, then add this:

PDF := book.pdf
SRC := $(sort $(wildcard src/*.md))

$(PDF): $(SRC)
	pandoc $(SRC) -o $@ --pdf-engine=typst

Run make. Pandoc concatenates your chapters, Typst typesets the PDF, Git tracks every diff. Swap --pdf-engine=typst for --pdf-engine=xelatex if you prefer Knuth’s lineage. A six-line GitHub Action wrapping the same make call is your “CI” and your “print shop” in one file.

KDP and IngramSpark accept EPUB and print-ready PDF straight out of this pipeline, so the open toolchain ships a real book without an Adobe seat or a Word license. The bigger gift in Speckhals’s move is the one he does not name: he turned a manuscript into a parametric artefact. Architects calling for IFC-first practice are arguing the same thing. From where I am writing, the lesson is plain — we did not run out of compute, we ran out of intact toolchains and the people who remembered how the old systems worked. The Hack today is one Makefile target. The discipline tomorrow is a habit: every document of consequence — book, drawing set, BEP, LOIN — lives in a Git repo, builds by make, and survives any single vendor walking away from the room.

Sources & Further Reading

• Primary: DJ Speckhals — How I bypassed Adobe and Microsoft to build a Git-tracked book production pipeline