When creating a new document, Publican allows you to choose between a book and an article. Compared to books, articles have a simpler structure, do not have a preface or a separate title page, and generally tend to be much shorter. Use an article if you intend to write a text with only a few pages. For larger documents, it is usually better to use a book.

To create a new book, type the following at a shell prompt:

publican create --type book --name "Document Name" --brand brand

Replace Document Name with the document title and brand with the brand you want to use (typically fedora). Similarly, to create a new article, run the following command:

publican create --type article --name "Document Name" --brand brand

Additionally, you can specify the --lang option followed by a language code (such as pt-BR or cs-CZ) to write the book in a language different than English.

The publican create command creates a new directory named Document_Name. This directory contains the publican.cfg configuration file and another directory named after the language code (that is, en-US/ by default), which contains boilerplate files as described in Table 6.1, “Files Created By Publican”.