Publishing toolchain

Question

I have a book project which I'd like to start sooner than later. This would follow an agile-like publishing workflow, i.e: publish early and often. It is meant to be self-publsihed by me and I'm not really looking to paper-publish it, even though we never know.

If I weren't a geek, I'd probably have already started writting in Word or any other WYSIWYG tool and just export to PDF. However, we know it is not the best solution, and emacs rules my text-editing life, so, the output format should be as simple as possible and be text-based.

I've thought about the following options:

• Just use orgmode and export to PDF (orgmode has this feature natively)

• Use markdown mode and export to PDF (markdown->LaTeX->PDF should not be hard to setup);

• Use something similar to what the guys @ Pragmatic Progammers do: A XML + XSLT + LaTeX. More complex, but much more control over the style.

• EDIT: Someone just told me that he uses a combo of Textile+Adobe In Design and the XTags plugin. Not sure how they are glued together though, gotta do some research.

Any other ideas / references ?

I want to start writting as soon as possible. In fact, I already have a draft in an org-formatted file. However, I do want to have and use the full power of LaTex later on to format it the way I want and make it look fabulous :)

Thanks in advance,

Marcelo.

Answer 1

You have already answered yourself. Not mentioning that you already started writing in org-mode. Org-mode is really extremely powerful and will enable you to publish to PDF and HTML eventually with no effort.

In case of PDF you can take advantage of LaTeX and how org-mode is working with exports. You can include any LaTeX code to your org file. Also IMHO it's way better to write the book/article in org-mode since something becomes even easier than in plain .tex files take for example tables.

Regarding Publishing it's a same story with one single function you can trigger exporting to HTML/PDF and uploading to your server. And notice that you are still using just plain text file which is human readable and very clean.

Org-mode really follows the Emacs philosphy just start using it and it will grow with you.