Re: Software For Book Writing

[oneman <lists@onemanifest.net>]

On 7-nov-2008, at 2:04, TW wrote:

> Hi,
>
> 	I'm going to be writing a political book soon and I'm not
> sure what software to use to write it.
>
> 	I want to use something like Vim to write it, but, I want
> to be able to convert it to OpenOffice/MicrosoftWord, etc. format(s).
> The reason that I want to use something like Vim is because I'd be
> able to make a more censored version of the book on the fly for
> certain people to download (underagers, for instance).  I thought
> that latex would be what I needed, but I'm not sure.  I thought
> DocBook, but isn't that for documentation?  I need something that
> goes the whole nine yards, The Little Brown Handbook style (footnotes,
> etc.).  Thanks for the help.

You might also want to look into ReST, part of docutils:

http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html

It is by far the most readable and simple markup language I know.  
It's a intuitive human readable plain text formatting that doubles as  
a markup. It will do footnotes, TOC etc. and can be parsed to PDF,  
HTML and tex. Like others pointed out, once you've got tex you can  
spice it up further if needed and parse it into various other  
formats. I use ReST for all my documentation, notes etc. and it never  
failed me.


Peter