Is there any software that will let me write books and export to both
PDF and HTML with automatically generated TOC, Index (with page numbers
for PDF) and hyperlinks?

Thanks !

On 2006-10-05, bringmewater@gmail.com <bringmewater@gmail.comwrote:

Is there any software that will let me write books and export to both
PDF and HTML with automatically generated TOC, Index (with page numbers
for PDF) and hyperlinks?

http://www.docbook.org/

Can you elaborate? Is everything I'm asking possible in docbook? Is
docbook an application or do I need a different program to do it? Is
this gonna look like Perl code or is this a WYSIWYG app?

Thanks,


Ben C wrote:

On 2006-10-05, bringmewater@gmail.com <bringmewater@gmail.comwrote:

>
http://www.docbook.org/

Quotes like this make me think this is not a friendly way to write a
book and dump it to pdf and html.

DocBook is way
too complex a DTD to try and use with a non-conforming editor:
you'll spend all your time hunting down mistyped brackets and
misplaced elements.


bringmewater@gmail.com wrote:

Can you elaborate? Is everything I'm asking possible in docbook? Is
docbook an application or do I need a different program to do it? Is
this gonna look like Perl code or is this a WYSIWYG app?
>
Thanks,
>
>
Ben C wrote:

bringmewater@gmail.com wrote:

Is there any software that will let me write books and export to both
PDF and HTML with automatically generated TOC, Index (with page numbers
for PDF) and hyperlinks?

Yes, loads. What's best depends on how much you're doing, how much
you're re-working afterwards, what your books are and what your skills
are.

The easy route here is something very like
XML -[XSLT transform] -XSL:FO -[Apache FOP] -PDF
XML -[XSLT transform] -HTML

Now you don't have to do it this way. There are any number of piss-poor
overpriced commercial products that will do it badly for you instead.
If you spend money on this, chances are you're wasting it _and_ you're
getting a bad result.

Then there are the LaTeX nutters with their beards and their equations
and their sandals and their Erdos numbers and their beards....

So you're going to do it with XML. Only question is, what to use as a
schema? There are three possible choices with some merit:

* Docbook. It's big and ugly, but it's already there and there's a
stack of XSLT based on it, especially for ToCs

* XHTML. Has a very obvious easy translation to HTML for web
publishing. Isn't even too bad for structuring content, so long as you
also pre-define a large set of class atribute values and the set of
elements it's acceptable to use them on within your system.

* Open Office and wherever desktop XML is going. Not there yet, but
it's one to watch for the future.

Oh, and avoid _any_ M$oft protocol anywhere near this. You really don't
want to look in that particular pit of weevils.

bringmewater@gmail.com wrote:

Quotes like this make me think this is not a friendly way to write a
book and dump it to pdf and html.
>
DocBook is way
too complex a DTD to try and use with a non-conforming editor:
you'll spend all your time hunting down mistyped brackets and
misplaced elements.

So use a conforming editor and don't top post.

--
David Dorward <http://blog.dorward.me.uk/ <http://dorward.me.uk/>
Home is where the ~/.bashrc is

bringmewater@gmail.com schrieb:

Is there any software that will let me write books and export to both
PDF and HTML with automatically generated TOC, Index (with page numbers
for PDF) and hyperlinks?

Adobe InDesign has PDF and XML export; I never tried XML export though.
I heard Quark Xpress also has HTML export, I never tried this either and
have some doubts about the quality of the code; and having your text
converted by someone might be much cheaper than buying Quark. MS Word
does both PDF and HTML, too, but the HTML is terrible. You have been
pointed to Open Office already.

--
Markus

On 2006-10-05, bringmewater@gmail.com <bringmewater@gmail.comwrote:

Ben C wrote:

Can you elaborate? Is everything I'm asking possible in docbook?

I think so. I've used it more for generating HTML than PDF, where I
certainly got a TOC and hyperlinks. But AFAIK the other things should be
possible.

Is docbook an application or do I need a different program to do it?
Is this gonna look like Perl code or is this a WYSIWYG app?

It's not an application, it's an "xml schema", which sort of means "file
format". It's not going to look like Perl code (maybe that's TeX you're
thinking of), but will look a bit like HTML (angle brackets, tags,
etc.). You can just use a text editor, but there are probably
alternatives.

If you want Perl code, you can always write some Perl to generate your
docbook.

If you want an application, maybe OpenOffice, as someone else suggested,
is the best thing-- there you edit your stuff in an application that
closely resembles MS Word and you can save it as PDF or HTML. Not sure
about the hyperlinks, TOC and Index. You'd have to check all that's OK.

bringmewater@gmail.com wrote:

Is there any software that will let me write books and export to both
PDF and HTML with automatically generated TOC, Index (with page numbers
for PDF) and hyperlinks?

I do this with the combination of LaTeX (http://www.ctan.org/) and
TeX4ht (http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~gurari/TeX4ht/mn.html), as I
believe this gives the best combination of quality and flexibility with
the least effort (once you've installed everything).

Admittedly I have a beard and sandals, so your mileage may vary.

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 10:51:52 +0200 from Markus Ernst
<derernst@NO#SP#AMgmx.ch>:

MS Word does both PDF and HTML, too,

Are you sure about that? There are add-ins, certainly, but when the
question gets asked on the MS-Word new-users group, as it does
frequently, the answer is always "Not in native MS-Word".

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2.1 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Why We Won't Help You:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/200..._wont_help_you

Stan Brown schrieb:

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 10:51:52 +0200 from Markus Ernst
<derernst@NO#SP#AMgmx.ch>:

>
Are you sure about that? There are add-ins, certainly, but when the
question gets asked on the MS-Word new-users group, as it does
frequently, the answer is always "Not in native MS-Word".
>

You are right - I also have Acrobat (full version) installed. On my box
both Word and OpenOffice have an export PDF button, but I could not say
if it was added by Acrobat, or is there natively...

--
Markus

Markus Ernst wrote:

You are right - I also have Acrobat (full version) installed. On my
box both Word and OpenOffice have an export PDF button, but I could
not say if it was added by Acrobat, or is there natively...

My OpenOffice 2.0 has Export as PDF, and there are no Adobe products on
this PC.

--
-bts
-Motorcycles defy gravity; cars just suck

In article <452a23fc$1_1@news.cybercity.ch>,
Markus Ernst <derernst@NO#SP#AMgmx.chwrote:

>You are right - I also have Acrobat (full version) installed. On my box
>both Word and OpenOffice have an export PDF button, but I could not say
>if it was added by Acrobat, or is there natively...

Acrobat added it. I noticed these icons appear after I installed
Acrobat.

-Alex