[OT] Book authoring

[wesley chun]

fwiw, i've given a related talk a couple of times on this subject, the
most recent of which was at EuroPython this summer:
http://ep2011.europython.eu/conference/talks/writing-books-using-python-open-source-software

the content includes a couple of the tools mentioned in this thread as
well as some author case studies. slide deck's available there too.

cheers,
--wesley


On Dec 9 2011, 7:43 am, Nick Dokos <nicholas.do... at hp.com> wrote:
> Grant Edwards <inva... at invalid.invalid> wrote:
> > On 2011-12-09, Miki Tebeka <miki.teb... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Greetings,
>
> > > Any recommendations for abook authoringsystem 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


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"Core Python", Prentice Hall, (c)2007,2001
"Python Fundamentals", Prentice Hall, (c)2009
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wesley.chun : wescpy-gmail.com : @wescpy/+wescpy
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