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I am currently writing my first print book, and honestly feel that LaTeX is the best solution. I want precise control over a 250+ page book. I have never seen a WYSIWYG editor that doesn't make that a royal PITA. Different gutters on left and right pages, chapters always starting on a right hand page, consistent and great justification, fine control over how chapter headings appear (and quick to update) etc. etc. On…
I am currently writing my first print book, and honestly feel that LaTeX is the best solution. I want precise control over a 250+ page book. I have never seen a WYSIWYG editor that doesn't make that a royal PITA. Different gutters on left and right pages, chapters always starting on a right hand page, consistent and great justification, fine control over how chapter headings appear (and quick to update) etc. etc. On…
YMMV though with pandoc, not sure how well it handles more fancy latex macros and packages.
The simplest thing to do might be start with a more HTML-based solution (e.g. Markdown with extensions, RST) and then compile that into whatever layout you intend for the physical/pdf form.
I have only three gripes about LaTex and friends. First, LaTeX was intended for physical publication, so there's no native notion of text reflow or "responsiveness". Worse, everyone distributes their documents as PDFs, which are a PITA to read on a smaller device or ereader. At best, an author could utilize something like pandoc to distribute an HTML version, but alas, publishers never give a damn. Second, I have bee…
For anything other than simple linear text, I've found PDFs easier to work with than alternatives, even using letter/A4 PDFs on a smartphone.
I am currently writing my first print book, and honestly feel that LaTeX is the best solution. I want precise control over a 250+ page book. I have never seen a WYSIWYG editor that doesn't make that a royal PITA. Different gutters on left and right pages, chapters always starting on a right hand page, consistent and great justification, fine control over how chapter headings appear (and quick to update) etc. etc. On…
You can compile from LaTeX to HTML with pandoc and then repackage the HTML into an epub using a tool like epubmaker[0]. YMMV though with pandoc, not sure how well it handles more fancy latex macros and packages. The simplest thing to do might be start with a more HTML-based solution (e.g. Markdown with extensions, RST) and then compile that into whatever layout you intend for the physical/pdf form. [0]: https://githu…
Pandoc has the advantage that you can still write LaTeX directly inline when you need to. You can also write in terms of divs and spans (which Pandoc understands natively) and convert these to whatever you want via filters. The latter approach has the advantage that different filters can generate the appropriate code for the format you're generating, so that you don't just lose the elements when you convert to an incompatible format.
Shameless plug: I've built a tool that helps manage the conversion: https://bitbucket.org/elliottslaughter/bookmd
I am currently writing my first print book, and honestly feel that LaTeX is the best solution. I want precise control over a 250+ page book. I have never seen a WYSIWYG editor that doesn't make that a royal PITA. Different gutters on left and right pages, chapters always starting on a right hand page, consistent and great justification, fine control over how chapter headings appear (and quick to update) etc. etc. On…
You can compile from LaTeX to HTML with pandoc and then repackage the HTML into an epub using a tool like epubmaker[0]. YMMV though with pandoc, not sure how well it handles more fancy latex macros and packages. The simplest thing to do might be start with a more HTML-based solution (e.g. Markdown with extensions, RST) and then compile that into whatever layout you intend for the physical/pdf form. [0]: https://githu…
I am currently writing my first print book, and honestly feel that LaTeX is the best solution. I want precise control over a 250+ page book. I have never seen a WYSIWYG editor that doesn't make that a royal PITA. Different gutters on left and right pages, chapters always starting on a right hand page, consistent and great justification, fine control over how chapter headings appear (and quick to update) etc. etc. On…
Neither gave me the choice to use LaTeX although I'm sure they might have been open to it had I asked.
It has worked amazing well. For a few reasons:
1. We easily can typeset all our documents the same and if we do something like change the letterhead we can easily update them all.
2. Auto-generating documents (forms letters) is a snap.
3. Everything is source controlled.
3a. If a client needs customizations we can give them their own branch and easily diff the branch with master. Very useful for documents that have legal side effects.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can compile from LaTeX to HTML with pandoc and then repackage the HTML into an epub using a tool like epubmaker[0]. YMMV though with pandoc, not sure how well it handles more fancy latex macros and packages. The simplest thing to do might be start with a more HTML-based solution (e.g. Markdown with extensions, RST) and then compile that into whatever layout you intend for the physical/pdf form. [0]: https://githu…
HTML doesn't have a notion of multiple pages within the same document though?
HTML is at a higher level of abstraction, but the HTML/CSS stack supports paged rendering, and browsers tend to support this for print (pre-Blink Opera did for on-screen use, though I don't know if current browsers do.)
I had a few things about TeX versus LaTeX. I think the reality is nobody really tries writing TeX. But, ultimately my beef is the straw man that markup is bad because it is harder to read. That a graphical editor is superior because it is more readable. Instead, the advantage is that in the one you are only writing text and you are indicating special instructions to the computer. In the other, you only see what the c…
The other huge advantage that you almost touched on is tex files are text, so you can source control them. This is particularly important if different people are working on different chunks of a document. You can kind of hack around this in word, but it's a giant pita.