Gutterpress Alpha: Make the Book. Own the Machine.

Indie creators should not need a subscription, a committee, or a ceremonial sacrifice to get a book from draft to print. You should be able to write the thing, shape the thing, inspect the thing, and export the thing without handing your whole process to somebody else’s platform.

That is the point of Gutterpress.

Today, Gutterpress v0.9.0-alpha.2 is available as an alpha release. It is an open-source desktop app and command-line tool that turns folders of Markdown and CSS into laid-out PDFs for print. You write the book. Gutterpress handles the paginated preview, page breaks, running heads, columns, page numbers, and the other print work browsers usually pretend is not their problem.

Download Gutterpress v0.9.0-alpha.2

Made for the people making the work

Gutterpress is built for writers, zine-makers, small presses, game designers, and anyone who wants a direct path from their source files to a finished artifact. Not another opaque content dashboard. Not a template jail with a logo stuck in the footer. Not a platform that turns your audience into a line item on someone else’s spreadsheet.

Your project is ordinary, inspectable material:

  • Markdown for writing.
  • CSS for typography, layout, and page design.
  • A manifest.yaml for project configuration.
  • Images and fonts in your project folder, referenced where you use them.

That is deliberate. The source remains readable. The design remains yours. If you need to hand the project to a collaborator, archive it, fork it, or take it somewhere else, you are moving files you own rather than begging a product to export your own work.

What the alpha can do

  • Create a book project with a starter template, stylesheet, and manifest.
  • Show a live paginated preview while you write and style.
  • Export standard PDFs from the desktop app or command line.
  • Build PDF/X output with CMYK and ICC-profile support for print workflows.
  • Use CSS for margins, fonts, columns, running headers and footers, page numbers, bleed, and page geometry.
  • Add Markdown-it plugins for project-specific authoring syntax.
  • Run linting, validation, audit, and preflight checks before the book leaves your machine.
  • Export HTML alongside PDF when that is useful for a guide, preview, or web publication.

The desktop app is the sensible start for most authors: open a folder, edit your files, watch the pages update, and save a PDF. It carries its own Chromium runtime, so authors do not need to install Node, Bun, or a separate browser just to export a normal PDF.

The CLI is there for people who want automation, reproducible builds, CI, or a workflow with more wires showing. Fair warning: the CLI needs a Chromium-based browser for PDF rendering. PDF/X and some validation steps also need external tools such as Ghostscript and qpdf. Alpha means we tell you where the sharp edges are instead of painting them beige.

Start a book, not a hostage situation

The CLI can scaffold a project like this:

gutterpress new "My First Book" --preset book
gutterpress preview ./my-first-book
gutterpress build ./my-first-book

For design-heavy projects, Gutterpress includes examples with custom fonts, page templates, columns, sidebars, callouts, and a complete design-guide pattern. You can build your own visual system with CSS custom properties rather than dragging your work through a proprietary editor until it looks almost like you meant it to.

Gutterpress can also use local version history by default when it creates a project. That gives authors a path back when an experiment gets strange, which is not a hypothetical. It is a publishing tool.

Alpha means alpha

This release is for creators who want to work in the open and help shape the tool. It is not a promise that every workflow is finished, every edge case is friendly, or every release will preserve every rough alpha behavior. Save your work. Keep it in version control. Report the ugly parts with enough detail that we can reproduce them.

The alpha release includes:

  • Desktop downloads for macOS Apple Silicon, macOS Intel, Windows x64, and Linux x64 AppImage.
  • Standalone CLI binaries for macOS Apple Silicon and Intel, Windows x64, and Linux x64 or ARM64 on glibc systems.
  • SHA-256 checksums for every release download.

The desktop installers and standalone binaries are currently unsigned. Verify the included checksum before bypassing macOS Gatekeeper or Windows SmartScreen. There is no native Windows ARM64 or Linux ARM64 desktop build yet; Windows ARM64 can use x64 emulation, while Linux ARM64 users can use the standalone CLI or Docker workflow.

Built for the gutter, not the gatekeepers

Gutterpress is not here to replace every tool. It is here to give independent creators a viable route around the ones built to own their workflow, their files, and eventually their audience.

Write in files. Style with CSS. Build locally. Print what you made.

The project is licensed under MPL-2.0. Read the source, open an issue, send a pull request, or make a fork that better serves your strange little publishing operation.

Get the alpha release · Read the source · Report an issue

Make the book. Keep the machine.