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Command-line publishing with EasybookCommand-line publishing with EasybookPosted Jul 27, 2012 8:18 UTC (Fri) by cmccabe (guest, #60281)Parent article: Command-line publishing with Easybook
It's interesting to know about another option. The PrinceXML dependency sounds like a real pain, though. I'm also not crazy about having to install a bundled version of PHP.
I think if I were writing a book, I'd use TeX. There is a learning curve, but it's very powerful and stable. I know that TeX is used a lot by mathematicians and computer scientists, but I'm not too familiar with how widely used it is in the mainstream publishing industry. Does MS Word still prevail there?
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Command-line publishing with Easybook Posted Jul 27, 2012 12:22 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
In the genre fiction publishing industry, at least, the entire workflow is based on Word 97--2003-format files (and features, such as change tracking).
Command-line publishing with Easybook Posted Jul 28, 2012 18:22 UTC (Sat) by dag- (subscriber, #30207) [Link]
I would use AsciiDoc for writing the content as it supports the Simple DocBook functionality. AsciiDoc converts natively to HTML, and converts to epub and pdf through its a2x helper.
For PDF output there are two options, either use DocBook+FOP, or asciidoc-odf to produce PDF output styled through LibreOffice.
Since AsciiDoc is used nowadays for various O'Reilly books it is up to par with the requirements for printed material and digital formats.
Command-line publishing with Easybook Posted Jul 30, 2012 7:34 UTC (Mon) by valhalla (subscriber, #56634) [Link]
Personally I'm currently writing almost everything (article-lenght stuff and posts for my website, mostly) in reStructuredText and then using one of the many tools available to transform it.
The best results for PDF generation are still those that go through LaTeX, and they may require some knowdlege of it for customisation (which works for me, since I come from that :) ), but people who don't know LaTeX can still ask somebody else for that bit of customisation and concentrate on writing the text.
There are of course also tool to generate HTML and ePub, and also a ODT, which would then allow to generate .doc files for submission to traditional publishers.
Most of those tools are written in python (a good number comes straight from docutils) and of course they don't have dependencies on proprietary software.
I've been looking also for a toolchain based on pandoc, which is able to generate even more formats, but it's support for reStructuredText is still somewhat limited. On the other hand it is an alternative for people who would like to use markdown (it's "native" source format), and of course it is still totally free.
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