Is Free Software Ready For E-publishing? 221
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?"
calibre (Score:3, Informative)
calibre is a free and open source e-book library management application that can convert to and from most of ebook formats. And does a pretty good job at it.
http://calibre-ebook.com/
Re:You should had compared (Score:5, Informative)
My fourth book (Go Phrasebook) is due to be published soon. I send 3 copies to the publisher:
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.
Pandoc (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Open source solves problems programmers have (Score:4, Informative)
RMS not boycotting e-books (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.
RMS isn't against e-books. He's against amazon's approach to e-books.
When copyleft restricts which tools may be used (Score:2, Informative)
But if you want to get something real done, it's just stupid to limit yourself to only open source OR proprietary software. Pick the best tool for the job.
Be careful: sometimes, especially in cases of works under a "copyleft" or "share-alike" license, a work's copyright license limits which tools for the job are lawful. For example, some licenses require works to be made available in an editable format that isn't Java-trapped [gnu.org].* See, for example, sentences containing "Transparent" in the GNU Free Documentation License [gnu.org] and sentences containing "technological" in CC BY-SA [creativecommons.org]. You can use proprietary tools yourself, but you also have to make sure that the work can be edited with free tools.
*Term's original is historical, prior to IcedTea.
Re:Pandoc (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed. For a PhD thesis on the politics of Nicaragua, I'd have started with markdown and then converted that to ePub and LaTeX.
Re:Calibre? (Score:4, Informative)
Because PDF to ePub conversion generally gives you pretty awful results. Nothing against Calibre. I use it. But most PDFs I've tried to convert for my Nook Classic have had less than stellar results: readable if you're lucky, but not nicely formatted. And if there are embedded images, all bets are off.
Transparent (Score:4, Informative)
This would only be relevant if we were discussing templates and packages to be embedded as part of the document
In the case of documents under the GFDL, the copyright license requires that those who distribute copies of the document also make copies available in a "Transparent" form, one editable using free software. So those who make derivative works have to make derivative works available in a "Transparent" form. Or perhaps I misunderstood "Transparent" in the GFDL; what am I missing