Maybe Atlas ? https://atlas.oreilly.com/
Ask HN: What software should I use to write a textbook?
31–40 of 70 posts
Re: Ask HN: What software should I use to write a textbook?
#32If you want ridiculously high power for doing anything you want with a book in any language, TeX and friends will grant you god's level.
Re: Ask HN: What software should I use to write a textbook?
#33If you have time to invest, go for a TeX variant (LaTeX or ConTeXt). That gives full control over any typesetting detail. I’d recommend ConTeXt [0] over LaTeX. A minimal document is as simple as \starttext Start writing here… \stoptext and you can go a long way from there, including making ebooks. Much better than LaTeX for layout control, language support, graphics integration, table generation, etc… It’s also intim…
If OP wishes to use Latex, they should probably use luatex or xetex - which are pretty much drop in replacements, but have unicode support. I believe the future of latex is going to be luatex.
Re: Ask HN: What software should I use to write a textbook?
#34I spent a lot of time on this before I settled on Pandoc and reStructuredText. However, if you have a publisher, they may dictate the medium.
I wrote about my experience writing a book on Emacs in Emacs here, and the tooling I used [1]
[1] https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/how-to-write-a-book-i...
Re: Ask HN: What software should I use to write a textbook?
#35If you have time to invest, go for a TeX variant (LaTeX or ConTeXt). That gives full control over any typesetting detail. I’d recommend ConTeXt [0] over LaTeX. A minimal document is as simple as \starttext Start writing here… \stoptext and you can go a long way from there, including making ebooks. Much better than LaTeX for layout control, language support, graphics integration, table generation, etc… It’s also intim…
There's also the Tufte style layout, latex template here: https://www.latextemplates.com/template/tufte-style-book
I think works really well for textbooks, with well-placed footnotes, sufficient margin space to make notes, etc.
There are, of course, many other styles, if you do not wish to utilize page area more efficiently.
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If you need nice equations (or even just Greek alphabet), and a no-hassle reference linking system, I can't think of anything other than TeX derivatives that will do a good job.
PS: If OP wants more useful suggestions, we need to know the topic and/or what kind of content the book will contain -- text, equations, floats/figures, photographs, etc.
Re: Ask HN: What software should I use to write a textbook?
#36I suggest Doconce (https://github.com/hplgit/doconce) which is a language that compiles to latex, html and other formats. It is easy to make a version specialized for tablet etc. It is used quite heavily at my university.
Re: Ask HN: What software should I use to write a textbook?
#37Begin with plain ASCII text. It's very easy to get distracted by the formatting and looks. Content is what's important. So begin with a basic editor like notepad/vi/emacs. Perhaps at best markdown. Get it done, then edited, then you can typeset with something like Latex/Word.
Just that. Maybe Word in the first place, for the spell checking. But, other than that, just use it as a plain text editor. I also find it useful to create a new file for each chapter.
You don't need Word for spell checking. For instance, Emacs can use ISpell, ASpell, etc.
Re: Ask HN: What software should I use to write a textbook?
#38Please do not use LaTeX. If your textbook is supposed to have special layout needs, you will have a hard time with LaTeX. Tables are a real nuisance in LaTeX as well - normally you have your data in some other tool like Excel or some Jupyter notebook or CSV. Turning the data into a nicely looking and well-placed LaTeX table is not straightforward. Sure, there are specialized LaTeX extension packages for a lot of functionalities, but you will need time to get familiar with them.
I would just start with MS Office or LibreOffice - both offer sufficient functionality and if you need more specialized tools, then those tools usually have an import function for DOCX /ODT files.
Re: Ask HN: What software should I use to write a textbook?
#39RMarkdown can make for some great textbooks. Take a look at the online version of R for Data Science, to see what can be accomplished:
Re: Ask HN: What software should I use to write a textbook?
#40It doesn't matter. Stop wasting time on thinking about the right tool and start writing. Way more projects fail because they are never finished (or even properly started) than because of wrong software.
Really. Writing text beats fighting with (whatever) tech.
Once the writing is done, you have something you know makes the formatting fight worth waging. That way, the half-hour you'll spend finding a bloody compromise for some problem won't be cutting into your writing.