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.

PDF files aren't pleasant.

The good news is that they're documented (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html).

They bad news is that they're rather complex.

I found four Python packages for reading PDF files.

• http://pybrary.net/pyPdf/ - weak
• http://www.swftools.org/gfx_tutorial.html - depends on binary …

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 …

The old code was 5700 lines of bad VB. The new code is Velocity, Flying Saucer, iText and 120 lines of glue. The old code will be replaced with perhaps 500 lines of XHTML-producing Velocity templates.

[The Flying Saucer site -- with the main menu on the right -- was confusing at …