Hmmm, I kinda like Markdown for that kind of thing. With Markdown links to the references, etc pages in one project folder.

So I guess, as a web guy, I would probably choose Markdown bundle, and go from there.

-Kevin Ridgway http://www.kevinridgway.com/

On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 11:34 AM, Thomas iamkenzo@gmail.com wrote:

If you decide to follow the Latex way, don't get too picky about your layout or you are going to shoot yourself in the head as I did some time ago. Let the text flow as Latex chooses it to, and don't try to go against it.

Moreover Latex is very highly verbose in terms of markup language, sometimes you end up having more markup than actual content...

I have yet to find a way to write a book me too.

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1. Option Latex ( Christopher and Thomas)

   Advantages:

• Can successfully handle footnoes, references and Indexes
• Provides pre-publishing Layout options

Disadvantages:

• Learning Curve

I really think people make too much of this. If you use the basic templates in TextMate you off to a flying start. You only learn something when you need it and if a project is taking time as a proportion of your effort it is not very great.

• Markup can become complex and bulk up

I do not see this as an issue.

• How about cross platform compatability ? ( Is it possible to get

stripped down textversions and such ?)

It is easy to export Latex to text. There are excellent converters to HTML but is not an ideal route - I would always prefer PDF. Cross platform no problem as latex works on Windows/Mac/Linux - hard to see a problem here.

Further Questions:

• How about Project handling ? ( My reference stuff is about 700 Mib.

Keep in seperate Project ?)

Latex is perfect for very large projects, books, even multivolume works.

• How about Images and Charts ( I also have some charts that are done

with Omnigraffle Pro that I wanna update occasionally without loosing reference track to the original Omnigraffle files)

There is no better environment to handle images (Apple's Pages does pretty well I have to say). I did all my graphics for my PhD in Omnigraffle, export to jpg or png and I could revise them whenever.

Finally if you ever need maths formulas, again latex cannot be beaten.

Finaly, finally latex is very beautiful. If you care for the aesthetics of a book or document, nothing can compare with using a well designed style. This is something you would leave to an expert and there are dozens if not hundreds of designs out there for books, PhDs, articles, newsletters, etc. I chose for my PhD a design by Andre Mede (www.mede.de) which was beautiful and much complemented in the end.

What markdown is better at is keeping text/html/pdf in sync if that is important. But you will not get the same aesthetics (as far as I can make out).

Christopher

2) Option Markdown ( Kevin)

Advantages:

• For Simplicity
• Easy conversion to HTML TXT and PDF
• For Layout PDF Versions Prince can be used

Disadvantages:

• Indexes , Footnotes and References can be used, however:
• Brett Terpstra's HTML Index Bundle can be used.
• If chapters are kept in single files, then this obviously makes a

conversion into other formats more complicated, need of Shell script commands, etc. Questions:

3. Option Scrivener in combination with Multimarkdown (Fletcher)

   Advantages:

• Allows nonlinear organization and writing
• Supports multimarkdown LATEX txt and PDF Export
• Both Import and Export with footnotes and Anotations are supported,

provided, certain requirements in Document structure are met quote: You want flexibility in your document - you don’t want to be tied into a single document type. With MultiMarkdown you can convert your document to XHTML, RTF, LaTeX, or Word .doc, to name a few. With the proper knowledge, many other formats are possible. end quote

• A Implementation Guide is available at the Scrivener formums here: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=497
• Template Support and multiple Layout options
• Footnotes , Labels and refs conversion into markdown supported

further Info: http://fletcherpenney.net/Using_MultiMarkdown_with_Scrivener Disadvantages:

• Project maintenance might get a little out of scope

NOTE: So this basically makes it possible to maintain your Book Project Folder under one Roof as project siblings Also: Multimarkdown export option provides XHTML which makes parallel Web publishing procedures and maintenance of certain Book-chapters for promotion easier 4) Further Markdown option (Markdown2Book Bundle by John Gruber based on initial Scripts by Allan)

http://lists.macromates.com/pipermail/textmate/2006-February/008160.html

• Designed basically for documentations:

quote: This bundle is for compiling a Documentation project made of several Markdown files to HTML. It generates a TOC, a print version with all chapters on one page and HTML files for each chapter. You can use references to easily link between your pages.

end quote ( Haven't checked this out yet in detail) If you have any additional suggestions, Ideas and also recommendations how a Project should be structured in each of those cases, then please let me know. I will then update my list and publish that in short on my Blog.

regards, marios

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Fletcher T. Penney wrote:

On 6/6/08, Christopher Brewster C.Brewster@dcs.shef.ac.uk wrote:

...

What markdown is better at is keeping text/html/pdf in sync if that is important. But you will not get the same aesthetics (as far as I can make out).

Christopher

Very useful suggestions indeed.

The reason I developed MultiMarkdown is to get the best of both worlds. You can write in a low markup environment, and if you choose to publish via LaTeX, you reap the benefits of high quality output. You can also customize the LaTeX source to your liking. I'll never write a document of any length/complexity in anything other than MultiMarkdown (or something like it) again.

I also agree that OmniGraffle can create some high quality output - if you use pdf instead of jpg, you can import the pdf graphic into your LaTeX document so that your graphics maintain the high quality you obtain from LaTeX for the text and tables. Just be sure to choose an appropriate font.

Good to know

I had fantastic results using this approach to publish a friend's PhD thesis via Lulu.com (Scrivener/TextMate/MultiMarkdown/OmniGraffle and some custom XSLT's and perl scripts). I think there were a few words that needed manual tweaking to correct where linebreaks were placed. Not bad out of 120 pages or so of automatic formatting.

I think finally that the combined Scrivener Multimarkdown Option is most compelling.

What remains is just go ahead and try it out. It was interesting to see, that paragraphs or text chunks are handled as single files in Scrivener, which you can then switch around to your need.

( Of course we already knew, that TextMate does all these things, but the GUI approach is kind of neat.)

Fletcher

Much thanks and regards, marios

Fletcher T. Penney wrote:

Obviously, I am biased, but this is the sort of thing I designed multimarkdown for. It's also the sort of project I would consider using Scrivener to help organize. My own workflow for a project like this would be to use Scrivener to organize sections, chapters, etc. You can optionally use an "Edit in TextMate" command (though I don't know offhand if that works in Leopard yet or not) so that you can edit the text in TM.

http://fletcherpenney.net/MultiMarkdown

Scrivener could then export the document as plain text. If you did your writing using the MMD syntax, it could be converted to LaTeX->PDF.

Ok thanks for the replies I compiled a small list to summarize the options at hand:

1) Option Latex ( Christopher and Thomas)

Advantages: * Can successfully handle footnoes, references and Indexes * Provides pre-publishing Layout options Disadvantages: * Learning Curve * Markup can become complex and bulk up * How about cross platform compatability ? ( Is it possible to get stripped down textversions and such ?) Further Questions:

* How about Project handling ? ( My reference stuff is about 700 Mib. Keep in seperate Project ?) * How about Images and Charts ( I also have some charts that are done with Omnigraffle Pro that I wanna update occasionally without loosing reference track to the original Omnigraffle files) 2) Option Markdown ( Kevin)

Advantages:

* For Simplicity * Easy conversion to HTML TXT and PDF * For Layout PDF Versions Prince can be used Disadvantages:

* Indexes , Footnotes and References can be used, however: * Brett Terpstra's HTML Index Bundle can be used. * If chapters are kept in single files, then this obviously makes a conversion into other formats more complicated, need of Shell script commands, etc. Questions:

3) Option Scrivener in combination with Multimarkdown (Fletcher)

Advantages:

* Allows nonlinear organization and writing * Supports multimarkdown LATEX txt and PDF Export * Both Import and Export with footnotes and Anotations are supported, provided, certain requirements in Document structure are met quote: You want flexibility in your document - you don’t want to be tied into a single document type. With MultiMarkdown you can convert your document to XHTML, RTF, LaTeX, or Word .doc, to name a few. With the proper knowledge, many other formats are possible. end quote * A Implementation Guide is available at the Scrivener formums here: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=497 * Template Support and multiple Layout options * Footnotes , Labels and refs conversion into markdown supported further Info: http://fletcherpenney.net/Using_MultiMarkdown_with_Scrivener Disadvantages: * Project maintenance might get a little out of scope NOTE: So this basically makes it possible to maintain your Book Project Folder under one Roof as project siblings Also: Multimarkdown export option provides XHTML which makes parallel Web publishing procedures and maintenance of certain Book-chapters for promotion easier 4) Further Markdown option (Markdown2Book Bundle by John Gruber based on initial Scripts by Allan)

http://lists.macromates.com/pipermail/textmate/2006-February/008160.html

* Designed basically for documentations: quote: This bundle is for compiling a Documentation project made of several Markdown files to HTML. It generates a TOC, a print version with all chapters on one page and HTML files for each chapter. You can use references to easily link between your pages.

end quote ( Haven't checked this out yet in detail) If you have any additional suggestions, Ideas and also recommendations how a Project should be structured in each of those cases, then please let me know. I will then update my list and publish that in short on my Blog.

regards, marios

What do you use to convert the markdown "source" into pdf? Do you know what peepcode or pragprog use to create their books?

James Gray wrote:

On Jun 11, 2008, at 5:15 PM, Thomas wrote:

...

Do you know what peepcode or pragprog use to create their books?

The Pragmatics use a custom build system they invented. It's XML at the level authors interact with it and LaTeX under the hood.

This is public knowledge that's been discussed in the past on their blogs. I can't go into much more detail due to the NDA we sign, but you could dig up those blog posts for some other minor tidbits.

James Edward Gray II

Sorry for the late reply,

Let me first say, that I am still evaluating all the options. Many thanks also to James.

This reminds me, of the obvious problem who to handle footnotes with markdown, textile or either.

We all know, that having text as a text-file at the core, keep it updated with the rest of the files is something that you hardly want to sacrifice. Therefore I believe that the markdown option of having all the options to cross convert your files to all your needs are extremely valuable to say the least.

I've looked into scrivener, did all the tutorial files and also consider this a valuable option. ( E.g. The Pane split option to open a mp3 file in the top and your work in the lower pane is valuable. The Idea just to brainstorm along and produce chunks, paragraphs, reorganize. This looks interesting )

Now, I've come to the conclusion, that all this will come at the cost of not having your files in sync, to do what you want.

I almost decided along the way, to write my stuff in markdown. ( Scrivener can be used to produce an rtf file to hand off to a prospective publisher ) This also means, that the whole writing process is different. Basically I will write the whole thing as it was meant to be straight from the head. ( Just consistently hammering it down ). The changes in this way of writing are minor corrections, and one of the major concerns is the footnote references.

I ran into this problem, when I converted huge txt files from some archaic HTML 3.2 Version into XHTML. ( It was all quite easy to do using regular expressions and Jame's Book has be a valuable resource for me to do so ) What's left there is some kind of command that needs to written that can consistently update the footnote references and numbers, while you insert new ones into the file, that you have already written, and update the whole stuff.

Here for the commenter who asked about Prince and PDF prints. Let me say this:

Very very nice. But I used it for a quite different purpose, where the formatting requirements are important and you don't care so much about the maintenance of your research: (See attachment of a clientmanual as an example and the command that I use to produce it. Adapted from Oliver Taylor http://ollieman.net )

Keep in mind though that a commercial license is around 3500 $.

Prince is easy to install. You then just tweak your CSS Files to taste

For an example see the attachment:

regards, marios

Nando Vieira wrote:

On Jun 5, 2008, at 12:20 PM, marios wrote:

...

...

Suggestions, links and resources welcome

Just read the thread today. I built a Ruby gem that handles book writing process with Textile or Markdown.

That sounds good, since I operate textile markup from the web-side, which always tended to hold me back to completely switch to markdown. ( Which I would prefer, since it is easier to type )

You can generate a PDF using the Prince XML which cost 495USD (the free version adds a small logo at the first page).

Wasn't aware of the price tag difference ( I think I had confused it with a Server license )

If you're writing a programming book, the code can be highlighted using your preferred Textmate theme.

I'm using it to write my RSpec book right now. Footnotes are supported and I working on the indexes system and TOC.

I will not have code, but footnotes and references. Some automatic index updating for TOC's from headers would be interesting though.

The best part is that you can layout your book professionally using CSS.

I think, that is indeed useful. You might want to release some free samples as teasers for your book, before even thinking to contact a publisher, and I had this in mind from the beginning.

Check it out: http://github.com/fnando/bookmaker

Very nice, it seems that more and more options are coming together, so thanks for that.

Don't know if somebody has suggested similar way, 'cause I haven't read the whole thread yet!

regards, marios