[TxMt] Re: Writing a Book with TextMate

[marios]

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




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