Slashdot Mirror

Yep, I use vim all the time for scripting tasks and FocusWriter for writing. At first I also used it for the rich text formatting, but I was using hacky scripts to convert it to other formats, e.g. starting OpenOffice in headless mode and converting to HTML...it was hideous. On top of that, changing text to bold and italic was easy enough, but I was doing things like changing three hyphens to em dashes and a specific character sequence to horizontal rules in those scripts because those things weren't easy to put in while I was trying to write.

These days I just write in Markdown and convert it with pandoc, and the HTML and EPUB output is infinitely better. All those special cases like em dashes and horizontal rules are handled correctly by pandoc with the -S (smart) option. Since it's just plain text now I could probably do it in vim, but I'm too lazy to come up with settings to do that since it's all there for free in Focuswriter. It looks just as good in Linux as it does in Windows, too.

If you like LaTeX and want to produce EPUBs, I suggest you take a look at Pandoc ( http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ and http://github.com/jgm/pandoc.git ). It's a sort of swiss-army-knife of document conversion. It'll convert LaTeX to EPUB with a decent degree of accuracy. Lately it has been getting a lot of LaTeX-related enhancements, but it's still missing some staples like honoring \newpage and centered text. There's another package called tex4ebook ( http://github.com/michal-h21/tex4ebook.git) that's more LaTeX-specific. It could potentially be better than Pandoc, but is quite a bit behind in maturity.

And there are an infinite number of reasons why LaTeX is better than both.

...and an infinite-minus-one number of reasons why Markdown is better than LaTeX (the "-1" being math typesetting). I don't remember the last time I opened a word processor to write something new as opposed to reading a document that's been sent to me. Instead, I'll open a new editor tab/pane/buffer and start typing good ol' barely-formatted text. And with Pandoc, I can trivially convert that beautiful plaintext file to HTML, Word, EPUB, LaTeX, or almost any other document format.

LaTeX is wonderful and I have nothing bad to say about it, but I personally only use the subset of its abilities that Markdown supports in a much easier, simpler manner.

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

Unless you do some really wacky latex stuff, pandoc works great

The solution to your problems is Pandoc which can convert LaTeX to EPUB if you like. Now, it will probably take some fiddling on your part with the output but it very much smooths the process.

Others have told me that the financial gain of publishing an academic book may be up to 700 USD. In comparison to current Scandinavian wages that really means very little, so I don’t think that earning another 700 USD should be a motive to restrict the access to one’s thoughts.

First of all I would like to commend you and thank you for this sentiment.

Is the open source community boycotting ebook formats, as Richard Stallman has proposed?

I don't understand, Stallman decries e-book formats that aren't open. There are many open e-book formats--including ePub. Granted, there are tools out there that allow you (to varying degrees of success like Calibre) to crack and convert to these formats but why bother? As you can see in that table, most everyone supports PDF. You are misunderstanding Stallman's gripe. It's not that we are boycotting e-books, it's that e-book makers are trying to carve out their own proprietary section of the electronic market, reader and creators included. So let them take their ball and play elsewhere. As you noted in your blog, this isn't the only problem:

Most ebook-readers out there so not implement the Epub-standard perfectly. That means that although one has an Epub that follows all the standards, one can be quite sure that it will not display properly on all the readers. Kovid Goyal, the creator of the Calibre ebook management software has done a good job in creating conversion scripts that create Epubs for all the different readers. Unfortunately they do this by breaking compatibility with the standard, and many distribution sites will only check whether your Epub complies to the standards and not whether the book will actually look good in the reader.

Most readers handle PDF, I would just stick to the output of LaTeX. I might suggest that your expectations are misdirected at the open source community and might be better directed at the makers of readers that apparently force you to break standards. It's the IE6 conundrum all over again.

Stallman didn't suggest boycotting ebook formats, just the DRM associated with them (big surprise there). The problem you are experiencing is that sometimes it's difficult to go from one open standard to another. The tools are lacking in maturity and I'm guessing that since my Android phone can easily display PDFs for me that there's not a lot of people demanding this ePub support that apparently needs multiple flavors for each device (and Calibre helps you with this). The tools exist but they'll only get you so far and I think the really special stuff that LaTeX does well is what you'll find yourself needing to fine tune in the end product. Look at how long it's taken LaTeX to get that beautiful and I think you'll discover that making a magical cure-all converter to ${random format} can be a non-trivial task.

If you start a kickstarter and get your university to donate hosting to making an open free market for any academic papers in any open format, I'd definitely throw in $20 (I've spent about $200 on kickstarter in the past two years). Either that or maybe throw your lot in with arxiv and work with them to fund more format support?

I've found pandoc (here: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) to be very useful for generating PDF/ePub/LaTeX/etc from Markdown formatted text files.

Except I can find redeeming content on various parts of other websites that provide actual information. I don't with twitter, or facebook.

Then you're not trying. It's that simple.

I'm not even following 20 people and I see interesting technical stuff come through on average at least once a day. Sometimes a lot of interesting stuff. For instance, recently I found out about pandoc via Twitter. Maybe you already knew about it. Maybe I would have found out soon about it anyway. Maybe not.

(Facebook's different -- it really is a near-pure "social" media, unlike Twitter, which is really more of a massively distributed broadcast medium than it is social per se. What is see there is sometimes "interesting" from an intellectual or professional or creative standpoint, but most of the time it's just bog standard personal news which isn't particularly special. Good for keeping track of people you care about.)

I've never used it, but MultiMarkdown is exactly what you are talking about:

http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/users_guide/what_is_multimarkdown/

Pandoc doesn't worry so much about generating html:

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

Main site

Demo site

Gitit is a wiki that uses a git repository as a backend and exports to LaTeX. I haven't used it myself, and I expect you'll have to do a bit of hand-editing of the generated LaTeX to match whatever template you're using, but it might be worth looking into.