On Thursday, December 20, 2012 00:34:19 you wrote:
> Inge,
>
> On 12-12-19, at 18:13 , Inge Wallin <i...@lysator.liu.se> wrote:
> > On Friday, December 14, 2012 13:39:25 Sylvain DENIS wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> I make "stands" and often I made small requests. The last appeared after
> >> the release of a software in "Apple". In education, many teachers use
> >> the software "iBooks Author". He realizes ePub with additional features
> >> (such as interactions). Is it possible to make the same kind with AOO?
> >> There is the plugin "Writer2epub" but it is far from complete.
> >> This is a strong demand in Belgium and France.
> >> Thank you for your response
> >
> > You could take a look at Calligra Author[1]. It's more or less exactly
> > what you're looking for. It's a new member of the Calligra Suite
> > especially made for creating ebooks.
> >
> > Well... In theory anyway. The first version hasn't actually been
> > released yet. That's going to happen at the beginning of January. There
> > is a release candidate out now which you can try out. It can export both
> > to epub2 and mobi formats and right now we are working on cover images
> > and adding epub3 features like support for MathML and multimedia
> > (embedded video). Calligra Author itself can already handle both
> > (although the first version has somewhat basic handling of math formulas
> > to be honest) but the export filter cannot yet.
> >
> >
> > [1] http://www.calligra.org/
>
> I'd like to try it out but my primary device is Mac OS X. I can use a
> virtualizer easily enough but my usual reaction to Windows is typical, if
> unprintable. KDE I can manage easily enough but if there is a Mac OS X
> binary that's pre-pre ready, I'd be game to give it a spin. You can send
> me info offline, if you like to preserve peace.
>
> BTW, Calligra is overall quite nice—a great job of coding and management.
>
> If I get a copy of the Author for OS X, I'll also be comparing it to
> Scrivener, which I've come to rather like for DTP, though of course, I am
> most comfortable with AOO.
>
> Cheers
> Louis
Hi Louis,
You can try the release candidate on any Linux distribution that packages it.
Or you could try it on Windows by downloading it from KO GmbH, my company
(although with your stated views on Windows that may not be so attractive :)
).
Unfortunately there is still nobody who has packaged Calligra for Mac yet and
released packages. The good news is that there is now a serious effort going
on. One of the Calligra developers is doing exactly this and I hope that he
will be read when the real release comes out in a couple of weeks.
Regarding Author itself you may become disappointed with the first version. We
started the development a bit into the development cycle and Calligra now has
a 4 month release cycle. So we failed to achieve our ambitious goals for 2.6,
which is the upcoming Calligra version. Right now Calligra Author is not much
more than Calligra Words with a rather good export to EPUB and MOBI formats.
What is there, though, is the vision. We want Author to be *the* tool that is
useful for all writers from concept to publication. This is different from,
say, Scrivener which is very good in the concept and writing phases but more
or less useless in the review and publishing phases. Author will eventually
have the people/scene/item databases that makes Scrivener so powerful but in
addition it will still be a real word processor with its support for common
formats (ODF and MS doc/docx), annotations, change tracking and so on. This
means that it's useful for interaction with reviewers, proof readers and
publishers when the first draft of the book is ready.
But my ultimate goal is the emerging education market. In my view the text
books of the future will contain multimedia, animations and interactive
contents. Calligra already has support for video in the documents and this
will be handled in export to EPUB3 in the next version. Except for iBook
Author from Apple there is *no* application that I know of that can write
contents like this except for applications like Sigil that work directoly on
the xhtml level inside the EPUB.
-Inge
