Commenting on my experience

Posted Oct 29, 2015 17:08 UTC (Thu) by gwolf (subscriber, #14632)
Parent article: What's new in TeX, part 2

Thanks for a nice read, Lee. I will surely take a look at some of the tools you mention.

I have published two books using LaTeX (both available online, although both in Spanish), and both are in some way related to this article — The first, non-technical in nature, is «Construcción Colaborativa del Conocimiento» (http://seminario.edusol.info/), an overview of the permissive-licensing creative landscape from eleven authors from different disciplines, while the second is technical (although not mathematically heavy), «Fundamentos de sistemas operativos» (http://sistop.org/).

As for the first, the authors submitted their content via a Web platform (fundamentally based on Drupal). The editting work was basically converting that to LaTeX, for which I used gnuhtml2latex (which I maintain in Debian; discontinued upstream for good reasons). The experience was... Nice, it made me learn a lot... But I would not go down that path again if possible. Fixing all the markup missed by gnuhtml2latex was painful, and once I started the editorial process, explaining to all of the authors the text was effectively frozen was a topic by itself :)

The second experience has been very positive, although there are some things I would like to polish. I am using a stack controlled by Emacs org-mode, which allows me to use a very light markup and export very good quality LaTeX code. The sources for the book are very easy to follow with no knowledge of its syntax (i.e.. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gwolf/sistop/master/not... yields chapter 1 "in the raw", and can be easily converted into LaTeX or into HTML (as an example, https://github.com/gwolf/sistop/blob/master/notas/01_punt... shows that same chapter converted by GitHub).

To finish my work with this second book, I only need a bit of time for polishing the result. I have most of the book exportable to HTML chapter by chapter (which is enough, say, to craft an EPUB), but I need to incorporate the needed changes for it to incorporate my bibliographic references done with Biblatex; writing a post-processor with this functionality cannot be too hard, but I have to get some free time to do it :)