[OT] Book authoring

[Nick Dokos]

Grant Edwards <invalid at invalid.invalid> wrote:

> On 2011-12-09, Miki Tebeka <miki.tebeka at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Greetings,
> >
> > Any recommendations for a book authoring system that supports the following:
> > 1. Code examples (with syntax highlighting and line numbers)
> > 2. Output HTML, PDF, ePub ...
> > 3. Automatic TOC and index
> > 4. Search (in HTML) - this is a "nice to have"
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language
> 
> I've used asciidoc extensively and reStructuredText a little. Asciidoc
> will produce all the formats you mentioned (though I've only refularly
> used HTML and PDF). reStructuredText is what's used for Python docs
> isn't it?
> 
> > Can I somehow use Sphinx?
> 
> Don't know what Sphinx is.
> 

I think Sphinx is used for the python docs: it sits atop rST and does
all the transformations/processing to produce the desired output
( http://sphinx.pocoo.org )

> And there's always the old stand-by LaTeX, but it's a bit more
> heavyweight with more of a learning curve.  OTOH, it does produce
> text-book quality output.
> 

There is also orgmode, which has been used for a few books
(http://orgmode.org ). I know it does HTML and PDF (the latter through
latex), but I'm not sure about ePub: ISTR somebody actually did ePub for
his book but I don't remember details. The indexing is manual:
add #+index: foo entries as required.  But in general, imo, automatic
indexing for books sucks raw eggs (it works much better for highly
regular source code like the python source base).

Nick