On Tuesday 29 January 2008, Joe Apuzzo wrote: > I should elaborate some more on what I want to do. Looking at this > "book" for a lack of another word is more like an OSS project as it will > be built chapter by chapter and accessible via a repository of some > sort. It's very technical ( go figure ) and needs lot's of images with > the text flowing around it. For printed copies one would need to pay a > printing fee.
Actually this is exactly what Greg Kroah-Hartman seems to have done when
writing Linux Kernel in a Nutshell; he seems to have written the book as
DocBook XML files and used Git to track differences as he wrote the book. He
then used a converter program to take the XML files and translate them to
HTML or other formats. Unforunately his scripts use db2h which I can't find
a Debian package for. See:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/gregkh/lkn.git
Note: the above repository is somewhat older than the PDF downloads on his
website, so for those wanting to read the book, don't use the above for that.
I haven't yet worked with DocBook but it's one of the things I'd like to
know because if I understand correctly the format can convert to groff (in
other words, man pages) as well as many other formats.
> So like any OSS project how to keep it accessible without adding
> complexity of LaTeX? I agree that is the best formatting tool but is
> there a compromise? A Wiki come to think of it would be cool since
> people could access the content and improve it making corrections etc.
> I do agree with Sean's point some time ago, we don't need to harvest
> trees to learn... that is why I would like an online version, offline
> version ( like PDF ) and for the small subset a printed option.
>
> Any further ideas?
LyX is a GUI LaTeX editor that seems relatively friendly, and which can
output HTML, plaintext, PDF, postscript, or even opendocument. Unfortunately
it can import MS Word, but not opendocument; however OpenOffice.org can
export to LaTeX, so you can go back-n-forth.
Ultimately you will need to know what the publisher expects for a document
format. As you probably don't yet have a chosen publisher I'm going to ask a
couple of authors that I know and see what document formats they've had
publishers request from them.
Cheers
-- Chris
--
Chris Knadle
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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