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Is Free Software Ready For E-publishing?

Posted by Unknown on from the information-wants-to-be-free dept.

johanneswilm writes "Over more than 3 years I have been writing my PhD thesis on the politics of Nicaragua. Being the most professional system for PDF generation, I went with LaTeX, and, to make the text accessible for the editors, I used the LyX editor. Now that the publication date comes near, I found I had to spend considerable time creating a script to convert the manuscript to formats such as Epub as none of the available tools were quite ready to do it automatically. Is LaTeX only good for writers in the natural sciences? Is the open source community boycotting ebook formats, as Richard Stallman has proposed? Are there better tools to do the same?"

3 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. Re:You should had compared by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Informative

    My fourth book (Go Phrasebook) is due to be published soon. I send 3 copies to the publisher:

    • Print, PDF, generated by pdflatex. Black and white with crop marks.
    • eBook PDF, generated by pdflatex, with cross-referencing hyperlinks and colour for the syntax highlighting.
    • XHTML, generated by some code I wrote, with hyperlinks and cross references and semantic markup in the code listings generated by clang for [Objective-]C[C++].

    The publisher can then just tweak the CSS for the ePub (XHTML) version. A C code listing has lots of span tags marking words as keywords, typedefs, macro uses, variables, and so on. How these are presented is controlled from the CSS, as is all of the rest of the styling.

    The important thing is to make sure you separate content from presentation. If you use a lot of TeX markup in your chapters, then it's hard to use anything other than [La]TeX to typeset it. If you use simple semantic markup with all of the macros defined in a document class, then you can parse the same markup easily with something else and then transform it into some other format.

    You could use some sort of XML and generate TeX from it, but typing XML is horrible. I like to work in vim, and with a couple of macros entering LaTeX is really easy.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  2. Pandoc by bbk · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  3. RMS not boycotting e-books by spf13 · · Score: 5, Informative

    While he states "We must reject e-books until they respect our freedom." He also outlines 7 things amazon's e-books do that violate this freedom. Fortunately epub is the most widely accepted e-book format and it has none of these 7.

    1. Available anonymously.
    2. Standard ownership applies.
    3. License determined by vendor, but many have very liberal licenses including CC and public domain.
    4. Open format based on html.
    5. Lending rules same as physical book.
    6. No inherent DRM (though Adobe has a version compatible with DRM).
    7. No one can remotely delete it any more than any other file on your computer.

    RMS isn't against e-books. He's against amazon's approach to e-books.