Book authoring

[Peter]

On Jan 4, 9:34 am, wesley chun <wes... at gmail.com> wrote:
> fwiw, i've given a related talk a couple of times on this subject, the
> most recent of which was at EuroPython this summer:http://ep2011.europython.eu/conference/talks/writing-books-using-pyth...
>
> the content includes a couple of the tools mentioned in this thread as
> well as some author case studies. slide deck's available there too.
>
> cheers,
> --wesley
>
> On Dec 9 2011, 7:43 am, Nick Dokos <nicholas.do... at hp.com> wrote:
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> > Grant Edwards <inva... at invalid.invalid> wrote:
> > > On 2011-12-09, Miki Tebeka <miki.teb... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > Greetings,
>
> > > > Any recommendations for abook authoringsystem that supports the following:
> > > > 1. Code examples (with syntax highlighting and line numbers)
> > > > 2. Output HTML, PDF, ePub ...
> > > > 3. Automatic TOC and index
> > > > 4. Search (in HTML) - this is a "nice to have"
>
> > >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language
>
> > > I've used asciidoc extensively and reStructuredText a little. Asciidoc
> > > will produce all the formats you mentioned (though I've only refularly
> > > used HTML and PDF). reStructuredText is what's used for Python docs
> > > isn't it?
>
> > > > Can I somehow use Sphinx?
>
> > > Don't know what Sphinx is.
>
> > I think Sphinx is used for the python docs: it sits atop rST and does
> > all the transformations/processing to produce the desired output
> > (http://sphinx.pocoo.org)
>
> > > And there's always the old stand-by LaTeX, but it's a bit more
> > > heavyweight with more of a learning curve.  OTOH, it does produce
> > > text-book quality output.
>
> > There is also orgmode, which has been used for a few books
> > (http://orgmode.org). I know it does HTML and PDF (the latter through
> > latex), but I'm not sure about ePub: ISTR somebody actually did ePub for
> > his book but I don't remember details. The indexing is manual:
> > add #+index: foo entries as required.  But in general, imo, automatic
> > indexing for books sucks raw eggs (it works much better for highly
> > regular source code like the python source base).
>
> > Nick
>
> --
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> "Core Python", Prentice Hall, (c)2007,2001
> "Python Fundamentals", Prentice Hall, (c)2009
>    http://corepython.com
>
> wesley.chun : wescpy-gmail.com : @wescpy/+wescpy
> python training and technical consulting
> cyberweb.consulting : silicon valley, cahttp://cyberwebconsulting.com

My apologies, but I just read the intro - no time to watch the video,
so I am probably missing the point of your post :-)

TeX/LaTeX is open source and does an excellent job - plus you can use
your favourite editor to enter the text (I have never been able to
understand why wordprocessors have never been extended beyond the
range of simple text entry functions - most editors offer so many aids
to text entry so you would think some WPs would have taken the hint
and put some more features in!).

So does this just re-invent the wheel (so to speak)?