51–60 of 70 posts
Then I switched to Leanpub.com and never looked back. With Leanpub markdown you can still use Latex for formulas.
I love to write and Leanpub takes almost all of the hassle/overhead out of the process.
My process is to use markdown [1] (very little style related formatting) and then convert to a desired format using pandoc [2]. Building multiple books that look the same, later revisions, etc - becomes really easy. One of the benefits is that you can convert a chapter to a webpage and gauge interest in the book itself. [1] https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ [2] http://pandoc.org/
Begin 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.
Latex is a bad recommendation I'd say. Just use AsciiDoc. The rest I agree with.
It is the easiest syntax for equations, but not everyone needs those. It does look better than Word, but it is a very high cost for a bit of good-looking.
You can write the text either as Markdown or LaTeX, and softcover will build PDF, HTML, ePUB, mobi versions of the book for you.
It's the only ePub generation strategy that I know of that doesn't butcher the math.
If 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…
Check a tutorial for the basic workflow and you are all set.
Many people have used it and still use it for their books, theses and such. I wrote my thesis with it back in the days. The best part was to be able to just focus on the writing, not formatting.
There is a layout mimicing the layout used by Edward Tufte in his books. That layout is awesomely readable (a highly subjective observation, I know).
I'd say, go with the simples you can find (maybe even LibreOffice Writer).
Worry about layout and imagination later.
Make sure the tool you use doesn't get in the way of actually writing the book.