The Hobo project already uses two excellent mechanisms for document
creation.
1) agility uses a combination of git and markdown
2) many of the manual pages use rubydoctest, which uses markdown
The key advantage of both of these approaches is that the code snippets
contained within are executable code, and can be easily verified or
pulled out.
This does mean that it takes longer to create the document, but you get
most of it back while verifying and bug-fixing the document, and it pays
for itself in spades when updating the document for a new version of
Hobo or new features, et cetera.
Markdown is not a great idea for long form documents meant to be
printed. LaTeX is the best choice for that, hands down.
The other consideration is that we would like to place chapters on
hobocookbook, which currently uses markdown.
The other advantage of markdown is that all of Hobo's current
documentation and tutorials are written in markdown, so cutting and
pasting is easier.
Another consideration is that far more people know markdown than know LaTex.
Another advantage is that you don't need to learn another editor -- you
need an editor with a good markdown mode. Luckily, the editor you
currently use for programming will probably work. Both emacs and
TextMate have good markdown modes, as will any popular ruby programmer's
editor.
Luckily, it is not difficult to transcode between markdown and LaTeX.
It's easy to transcode from markdown to LaTeX, and is easy to transcode
from LaTeX to markdown if you agree on an appropriate subset of LaTeX.
It's my strong opinion that any future book projects be written in
Markdown and stitched together with LaTeX.
Bryan
blueHandTalking wrote:
Well, I would vote on the checking it out part.
LaTex is excellent, but oy-ya-veh!
Talk about an investment in time!
If Lyx does not have a steep learning curve,
I believe it would be great to use LaTex in this fashion.
Jet
Hi Owen,
I was the one who suggested using Lyx for this project.
Lyx is a frontend processor to LaTex, et al, which let's you write
your document while it takes care of the formatting. It's has a long
pedigree, works on Linux, Mac, Win
platforms, and is highly stable, with an active developers base.
See website and wikepedia page:
www.lyx.orghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LyX
Also check out some of these article links I got off its website:
http://www.tuxradar.com/content/lyx-made-easyhttp://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/11/the_next_document_i_put_tog...
I think this is the all around best choice for this type of rapid (pun
intended) project.
Lyx comes with its own version control system, or can use an external
one, imports and export to Latex, PDF, etc, and produces output that
you can absolutely control and see what it looks like before going to
print.
Oh, and it's all open source software and FREE!
Besides the initial learning curve, there are very few reasons for not
using Lyx as a long term platform for producing any of the documents
the Hobo project will/should produce over its lifetime.
My 2 cents.
Jabari
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