On 9-nov-2008, at 10:35, Emanoil Kotsev wrote:
oneman wrote: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 wantto 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 thatgoes 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. PeterCome on. I've been using this for WiKi and I still don't understand what such a great advantage this has over the normal WiKi markup or some other markup, with exception of the argument that you just learn another markup,that's more human friendly. I think LaTeX is the best! You can convert export and manipulate thedocument very efficiently and if you have graphics, mathematics and so onI've not seen anything better yet.How do you write a mathematic formulae in ReST??? I've never needed so Idon't know if it's possible at all.
You're right, it's just "another markup,that's more human friendly". But that's my whole point. Tex is the best to get great results for complicated stuff. I used it for propositional logic assignments and it was a joy to use. For a wiki, ReST isn't much of an addition either, any wiki dialect will do.
The OP however will, just like me with my documentation, be looking at the markup itself during the whole writing process and will probably not need anything fancy like formula's. Unlike writing in a wiki, where you do some limited writing and then save and render the page, when writing a book or documentation you only render when someone else needs your product in a nice looking format. In such a case ReST is great since it results in an easy readable document in itself.
You can do it in tex and by very happy, I just like to do it in ReST and so _might_ the OP.
Peter