Khaled, Ross,
As I wrote above, if it is about the structural formating, then it does
not worth the trouble, it can be achieved with almost every tool and
document format out there (even office suits can build structured
documents). It is visual, the precise output, where TeX excels which is
totally lost during such conversions.
This can be useful, however, if one have existing TeX material that need
to be processed to other output format, though one can still argue that
converting it ones to some sort of XML is much better long term plan.
Don't get me wrong, I like TeX syntax and find it more easier to author
with than many other markups, but I accept that it does not fit every
need.
I write textbooks. I write these in TeX, because that allows me to
easily modify very large, structured documents. I have used DocBook in
the past, and the best way I can summarise it, is "easy to write
initially, migraine inducingly insane to update or revise". It is really
easy to mark up a document as DocBook, and it is then very hard to
modify the structure without getting so frustrated with the utterly
inadequate DocBook editors on the market that you resort to completely
wiping the document's markup, moving everything around, and then
reapplying all the markup.
TeX, on the other hand, is "steep learning curve for the initial
document, child's play to revise". It's why I gave up DocBook in favour
of TeX. So that's my situation. My texts are in TeX, and we take it from
there: I would like to generate not just pdf, but also epub from these
sources, without having to write a completely different book using a
completely different toolchain that gives me two completely different
documents with the same words in it... I can't even being to imagine the
potential for errors and inconsistencies that introduces =)
It's not really about a favourite "synax", it's about having a tool that
already produces a device independent document format that then gets
converted to a specific device readable format. Can that independent
format also be converted to epub? If it can't, that unfortunate, and
perhaps someone will end up writing a dvi to epub driver (limited in its
functionality by what epub offers for document layout). If it can, then
that's great and I'd like to start using it as soon as possible.
- Mike
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