Edward K. Ream said on Fri, 9 Apr 2021 12:41:30 -0500 >On Thu, Apr 8, 2021 at 7:55 AM Steve Litt <[email protected]> >wrote: > >Hi Steve. Thanks for the summary. I'm not sure I have the attributions >correct below, but here are my comments. > >> I'm also looking into something called Restructured Text and a >> program >called Sphinx that seems to be a front end for Restructured Text. It's >complicated and I don't think would be appropriate for Lindsey. > >Imo, Sphinx + rST are relatively easy to learn. Those tools should >suffice to write almost any book.
Thanks for the tip! I'll put some more time into Sphinx + rST. > >> There's also an outliner called Leo, which you can author entirely >> as an >outline with headlines that do or don't contain body text, and then (I >think) you can run a converter program, possibly one you'd need to >create yourself, to turn it into a ready made book, probably either >PDF or HTML/ePub. > >Hmm. It would be nice if commentators tried out the tools they are >describing. :-) I've tried Leo many times, but still don't know even 3% of it. > >Leo's rst3 command is the "converter" program. rst3 complements >rST/sphinx as follows: > >- Can generate multiple documents from a single outline: one per @rst >node en. >- Automagically creates rST section markup using outline structure. > This means you can reorganize your paper or book freely, a huge > advantage. >- Optionally generates intermediate files for sphinx. > >> As we have been describing on leo-editor, rst3 supports a very few >frills, including ignoring parts of the @rst tree entirely, or not >generating section markup for one or more nodes, thereby allowing >authors to organize long sections using suboutline. > >> This isn't appropriate for Lindsey, because it's a huge system with >> huge >capabilities requiring a lot of knowledge: It's a commitment. I'm >copying the Leo list on this email. >Did the commentator mean that Leo itself is a huge system? True >enough, but working through Leo's tutorials ><http://leoeditor.com/tutorial.html> is all someone needs to do to >start writing their opus. I was the commentator. I've worked partially through the tutorials several times, but got bogged down and went on to other things. I'm speaking as a Leo outsider or newbie here: Leo has so many capabilities that learning the majority of it is a serious commitment. All the capabilities are real, needed things, I have no doubt of that. All I'm saying is learning something that capable is a commitment, and in my experience a linear walk through several tutorials wasn't enough to get me capable beyond regular outline workflow. I'll try again when I get some time. >> I feel everybody's pain. As far as I know, there's not a single >> piece of >software out there that authors quickly and yet does consistent, >styles-based formatting and outputs to both PDF and HTML. But I'll keep >searching. > >To summarize my responses to such discussions: > >1. You're screwed if you insist on wysiwyg. How do you create a table >of contents? That's my opinion also, but Lindsey's workflow, priorities and past experience lead him to WYSIWYG. > >2. Some people spend their whole life complaining about missing tools, >without any clear idea of what they want. Others use the tools that do >exist. Some people even help improve the tools they use :-) Yes, I didn't give full context. Earlier in the thread, I had remarked that because of LibreOffice's handling of styles, it was unsuitable for long documents, and gave (as I remember) Bluefish, Leo, MS-Word, Inkscape, LyX, Stylz (which is not complete), org-mode, and several other alternatives. Lindsey basically said LibreOffice was good enough for him, and for times sake he likes WYSIWYG. In one situation I agree with him: If I had a quick 1 pager to write, I'd use either LibreOffice or Inkscape and be done with it, not a more robust tool meant to produce bigger and higher quality output. So it wasn't Lindsey complaining about missing tools, it was me. And I'm referring to exactly one thing: The ability to create a style on my own, with a name created by me, and have that style stay a style all the way through the compile chain until being translated to an appearance in the very last process. A good example is CSS: p.story{font-style: italic; margin-right: 1em; margin-left: 1em;} and later <p class="story>It was a dark and stormy night, and seated round the campfire was a bunch of dark and dusty brigands. When the captain said to Antonio, "Antonio, tell us a story", Antonio stood and related the following: It was a dark and stormy night ... </p> The cool thing about CSS in HTML is that, if the HTML is actually meant to produce an ePub, the p.story style stays a style all the way through, and is translated to appearance by the ePub reader. In LaTeX, my Story "environment" (TeXish for paragraph style) is as follows: \newenvironment{storyL}{ \par \begingroup \leftskip 0.4in\rightskip 0.4in \it \noindent{.\dotfill{}.\par} %~\vskip -0.3in }{ %~\vskip -0.05in \par\noindent{.\dotfill{}.\par} \endgroup %~\vskip 0.0in ~\\ } Once again, I named the style, I defined it, and that style stays a style until conversion to either a PDF or a dvi (which is a non-editable file convertable to PDF). The ability to name and define a style that stays a style throughout the editable files of the entire compile chain is all I want out of life, assuming no premature conversion of the style p.story to appearances, and assuming that in each format (html, ePub and PDF) I can create a different style to appearance mapping for p.story, that gets applied at the very last minute. Without Pandoc. Markdown has no such ability. Neither does AsciiDoc. AsciiDoctor *might*, but it appears to be very complicated. LyX' HTML exporter does very premature conversions of styles to appearance, so that the resulting HTML loses most of its styles, meaning you can't convert from HTML to something further. What I've briefly read about Sphinx + rST is that it might be able to --- perhaps with the use of rolls, but I've found no example on the Internet, so I have to experiment. In a perfect world I'd get Stylz perfected and running, because that would be a technically-aware author's dream: Write once, fast, keyboard only, and output to anything, including PDF, HTML and ePub, each with a style to appearance mapping suited to reader needs according to format capabilities and limitations of the format. If I ever do get Stylz running, I'll do whatever it takes to make it Leo compatible so somebody can author in Leo, with body text being Stylz. SteveT Steve Litt Spring 2021 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/20210412132415.55043ab0%40mydesk.domain.cxm.
