Tools for Publishing in Multiple Formats?

Truist asks: "What are the best tools (windows or *nix) to use to publish a single source document in multiple formats, specifically plain text, multi-page HTML, and PDF? I'm trying to publish a (60-page+) NetBSD installation guide/documentary online, and I want plain text for easy download and 'less'-ability, HTML for easy browsing and search engine indexing, and PDF or Postscript for easy printing. It's currently a Word document (I know, I know - I'm happy to manually convert it to something else) with multiple styles, including regular text, lists, internal links, external (web url) links, code, and notes, and I'd like to preserve as much as possible of each in the final output. Some additional notes: there are no graphics, and I expect to update this document periodically, or to split it into parts and maintain the parts (think master document / subdocuments). It won't be updated too often, but if re-publishing could be scriptable, that would be fantastic."

Comments

OpenOffice?

[HolyCoitus]

Open Office can save to all of those formats. It isn't scriptable, but all those outputs are done easily enough. Has that been taken into consideration or am I off base on what you are looking for?

texinfo 0wns docbook

[hubertf]

I've written some extensive docs in texinfo and moved it rather easily to pdf, html and plain text.

I've tried doing the same for docbook and it plain sucked. While the DocBook format itself is nice, the tools for transforming are too complex (for me?), esp. if you want to customize conversion to HTML or PDF. This definitely goes for DocBook/SGML, and by what I've seen so far DocBook/XML too to some extend.

Thus I'd rather say "texinfo", at least unless someone comes up with a foolproofed suite of tools for DocBook->PDF+HTML.

My $0.02.

- Hubert

On a Mac it's easy...

[foniksonik]

Too bad they are such a large investment just to publish. Applescript allows for doing very complicated workflows using multiple applications. You can even 'compile' it as a droplet for drag and drop functionality.

If I was doing this on my Mac I would create a script to, in order: Save my Word file as Plaintext, Save it as HTML, Print it as PDF (OS X can print to PDF from any and all applications), use the ColorSync Utility to regenerate the PDFs with your desired compression settings, then use an HTML cleaner such as HTML Tidy to eliminate all the crappy MS HTML markup. With Applescript it's a point and click operation to create the script, just hit record and go through the motions described above, hit stop and save as a droplet. You can drag and drop any number of Word docs onto it when ever you need to 'publish'. You could add an FTP action or save to an iDisk as part of the workflow just as easily.

The only thing you have to worry about is some of Word's [table] markup as it seriously blows when you try to convert to normal html.

There are plenty of tools for XML/XSLT transforms that could be scripted as well but it could be overkill... or maybe not.

If you had a Mac it would be easy.