[Python-authors] Book writing software

[Vasudev Ram]

Forgot to mention that you can use my xtopdf toolkit to very easily create
at least early drafts of a PDF ebook, though only if the book consists of
text only - images and other features are not supported.

There are two ways you can use it:

If you can arrange for your book draft (at least in the early stages of
writing) to consist of a set of text files, one per chapter, then the PDF
can be created simply running PDFBook.py, which is included with the xtopdf
package. Using PDFBook.py in this way may be useful to create early drafts
as PDF, and send them to others for review, to review yourself, or to take
printouts of, for review. Run PDFBook.py without arguments to see the usage.

If you want more programmatic control, another possibility is to read your
book text into a Python program and then use the PDFWriter class in the
PDFWriter.py module, to generate the output. This will let you set
different fonts for different parts of the book, same for headers /
footers, and control where pages break.

Take a look at PDFWriter.py - the main() function includes examples of how
to use the class.

The latest version of xtopdf is at https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram/xtopdf

Tabular output - from CSV / TSV / XLS data - can also be created in the PDF
using xtopdf; see this article for some examples:

http://packtpub.com/article/Using_xtopdf

The output will be simple the cells of the tabular data - no formatting.

- Vasudev

Inspired by nature.
- dancingbison.com | @vasudevram | jugad2.blogspot.com


On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 11:39 PM, Mike Driscoll <mike at pythonlibrary.org>wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm going to go the self-publishing route. Right now, I'm going to focus
> on ebooks, although converting it to print would be fun later on.
>
> - Mike
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 12:33 PM, Vasudev Ram <vasudevram at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>>
>> IMO, what software you use depends at least to some extent on whether
>> you're planning to self-publish it or use some kind of publisher, either
>> one of the traditional ones or the online ones. If you use a publisher
>> they'll likely have some restrictions about the kinds of software you can
>> use to write the book with. If you're publishing yourself, the field is
>> wide open, as to the choice of software you use, as long as whatever you
>> use meets your needs not only during the writing process, but also during
>> the process of creating the final product in different formats - print or
>> ebooks - and in ebooks, what formats: PDF, .mobi, EPUB, HTML, etc.
>>
>> Some options to check out (you may know them already):
>>
>> - Lulu.com
>>
>> - Leanpub.com
>>
>> - Amazon CreateSpace
>>
>> And there are others.
>>
>> HTH
>> Vasudev
>>
>> Inspired by nature.
>> - dancingbison.com | @vasudevram | jugad2.blogspot.com
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 10:54 PM, Naomi Ceder <naomi.ceder at gmail.com>wrote:
>>
>>> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 12:14 PM, Mike Driscoll <mike at pythonlibrary.org>wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> I keep thinking I need to write a Python book and I think I'm finally
>>>> ready to start. Can anyone tell me what software they recommend for writing
>>>> the book in? I hate MS Word for writing long documents with markup, but I
>>>> don't think Notepad++ really makes sense either.
>>>>
>>>> Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks!
>>>>
>>>
>>> For me the choice was largely determined by the publisher's
>>> requirements, so I have suffered through using Word (and Open Office, since
>>> it crashed less frequently).
>>>
>>> No useful advice from me, just a caveat. The real pain point I've always
>>> felt is keeping code snippets current through testing and revision. I know
>>> that some people have been working on solutions to this issue. I can tell
>>> you that managing code when writing in something like Word is a total
>>> nightmare.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> -------------------
>>>> Mike Driscoll
>>>>
>>>> Blog:   http://blog.pythonlibrary.org
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Python-authors mailing list
>>>> Python-authors at python.org
>>>> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-authors
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Naomi Ceder
>>> https://plus.google.com/u/0/111396744045017339164/about
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
> --
> -----------------
> Mike Driscoll
>
> Blog:   http://blog.pythonlibrary.org
>
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>
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