On Wed, 2004-08-18 at 10:52, Derek Smithies wrote:For writing books, (La)TeX is the way to go. You get a book that has professional, production ready fonts.
If you want your document to be transformed into multiple formats then I suggest Docbook XML. The "xmlto" package will transform the Docbook XML
Actually, I write for publication occasionally, and the best format for me is a plain text file, with no machine-readable markup.
This might be a feature of the publishers workflow, which is to use a copy/paste operation into Adobe InDesign that handles only text, and no attributes. I embed instructions to the editor-as-a-human occasionally, and they usually get honoured.
This isn't the technical environment, but the business one. It's cheaper to employ someone to copy/paste than it is to work out the "right" way to do something. I envy academia sometimes.
-jim
