Let's say you want to self-publish an ebook and a print-on-demand paperback book.
This isn't impossible, nor is it particularly easy. Here's what I've learned.
You've got two obvious paths to make sure your EPUB book and your print-on-demand book match:
Stand-alone document files for tech writing are awful. They should not be used as widely as they are.
We used to call editors like MS-Word WYSIWYG -- What You See Is What You Get. Once upon a time, an editor that immediately presented the final rendered doc …
I've been an on-and-off user of LaTeX since the very, very beginning. Back in the dark days when the one laser printer that could render the images was in a closely-guarded secret location to prevent everyone from using it and exhausting the (expensive) toner cartridges.
A consequence of this is …
more ...See http://www.dexy.it Wow. That seems cool. I write. A lot. I've tried a lot of tool chains. A lot. And I mean non-trivial "try". Whole books. Hundreds of pages. LEO + my own HTML Templates. A lot of fun at first. An outliner that generates RST is a …
more ...Here's an object lesson in bad requirements writing.
"Good" is defined as a nice simple and intuitive GUI interface. I would be able to just pick symbol from a pallette and put it somewhere and the software would automatically adjust the spacing.
Some problems.
Completely revised the Building Skills in Python book.
It now covers Python 2.6 and is much, must easier to maintain in ReStructured Text markup, formatted with Sphinx and LaTeX (via TeXLive) than it was in XML.
XML -- while modern and clean and uniform -- isn't as convenient as LaTeX and …
more ...I wrote the first Building Skills books using Appleworks. It wasn't too bad to organize the styles around basic semantics of the subject area. It's an easy, productive writing environment. Except, of course, for internal cross-references, indexes, and tables of contents.
I converted to DocBook XML markup. The conversion was …
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