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Ask HN: I am writing a book what tools do you recommend?

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Re: Ask HN: I am writing a book what tools do you recommend?

#21

Post by davidhbolton »

If you use Windows, take a look at Jutoh.com. It's commercial but not very expensive and excellent for creating .mobi and epub books. It's strength include support for images, tables and source code listings and it has excellent compatibility checking.

The author Julian Smart is also the creator of WxWidgets and Jutoh is very fast at compiling Ebooks. He is also very good at support; I suggested a feature and he had it implemented in a couple of days. I created a 350 page non-fiction ebook.

Re: Ask HN: I am writing a book what tools do you recommend?

#22

Post by dirktheman »

My french teacher back in high school was also an emerging novelist (he's now quite famous here in The Netherlands). He used a system with pink colored post-it notes to keep track of his story lines, yellow post-its for quotes and green post-its for general ideas. His desk used to be a nice collection of post-its, and he would regularly send the entire class away to work on his novel. (He'd be really startled when the class entered his classroom, as if it was a large surprise that he'd have to teach us french. "Eeehm... I'm busy. Go away!" he'd say).

Bottomline: use the simplest tools you can and don't let things (or classes!) distract you.

Re: Ask HN: I am writing a book what tools do you recommend?

#23

Post by japhyr »

max_ wrote: post #4
sidpatil wrote: post #2

What's the subject matter of the book?

Non fiction, filled have simple line diagrams and a little mathematics.

Is there any code in the book? If so, are they fairly short snippets, or do you build up longer scripts and projects over the course of a chapter or more?

Re: Ask HN: I am writing a book what tools do you recommend?

#24

Post by foopod »

abhiyerra wrote: post #15

I was trying to figure this out for a piece of non-fiction which isn’t technical. I wrote it in Emacs using markdown and it proved to be hard to collaborate and get feedback from non-technical people. I looked at Dropbox Paper and Notion since they also supported markdown and those were also hard to get suggested changes. I looked at Word and document sharing and although that was better it had a few problems with On…

I was similar to this. Wrote in Markdown, eventually ended up in Google Docs. But kept my source in markdown.

You can use Pandoc to generate PDF's then send out pdfs via Google Drive so people can comment and add suggestions. This was really useful for proofing, but having to pull up two screens and make changes to source instead of the annotated version was a bit painful.

Re: Ask HN: I am writing a book what tools do you recommend?

#25

Post by max_ »

japhyr wrote: post #23
max_ wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non fiction, filled have simple line diagrams and a little mathematics.

Is there any code in the book? If so, are they fairly short snippets, or do you build up longer scripts and projects over the course of a chapter or more?

Not really, the algorithms are most likely represented mathematically
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