Publishing toolchain

Question

I have a book project which I'd like to start sooner than later. This would follow an agile-like publishing workflow, i.e: publish early and often. It is meant to be self-publsihed by me and I'm not really looking to paper-publish it, even though we never know.

If I weren't a geek, I'd probably have already started writting in Word or any other WYSIWYG tool and just export to PDF. However, we know it is not the best solution, and emacs rules my text-editing life, so, the output format should be as simple as possible and be text-based.

I've thought about the following options:

• Just use orgmode and export to PDF (orgmode has this feature natively)

• Use markdown mode and export to PDF (markdown->LaTeX->PDF should not be hard to setup);

• Use something similar to what the guys @ Pragmatic Progammers do: A XML + XSLT + LaTeX. More complex, but much more control over the style.

• EDIT: Someone just told me that he uses a combo of Textile+Adobe In Design and the XTags plugin. Not sure how they are glued together though, gotta do some research.

Any other ideas / references ?

I want to start writting as soon as possible. In fact, I already have a draft in an org-formatted file. However, I do want to have and use the full power of LaTex later on to format it the way I want and make it look fabulous :)

Thanks in advance,

Marcelo.

Answer 1

I have done a TON of research on this lately, since I'm planning on starting my own small press soon.

It really depends on what you want your final output to be (PDF, HTML, other?), and what the book is about.

Org mode is great, as I'm sure you know, because it expands as you do. I often write my outlines in org mode, then just fill in the body text when I'm really ready to start writing.

IF it's prose, and you just need some simple divisions (chapters and sections and not much else), org mode -> latex should do you just fine. Then you also have the possibility of org mode -> html

IF you need math in it, you can just write the math right in the org mode file.

If it's really really technical information, docbook might be nice (emacs + nxml), then dockbook 4.5 -> jade -> jadetex -> pdf.

I'd stay away from docbook 5, because it uses FOP to generate PDFs, and the typesetting is really inferior to latex.

BOTTOM LINE: If you want a PDF, use org -> latex, the path of least resistance ;) -- whatever you do, concentrate on the content of the book first, and worry about what it looks like til after.

And why not paper publish? Have you looked at lulu.com? I recently formatted a book with latex, uploaded the pdf to lulu, and had them print it. The quality is pretty good, and definitely worth a look. I have a ton of bookmarks at home about publishing in general, if you're interested.