Re: Software For Book Writing
On Sun, Nov 09, 2008 at 12:54:11PM +0100, oneman wrote:
>
> On 9-nov-2008, at 10:35, Emanoil Kotsev wrote:
>> I think LaTeX is the best! You can convert export and manipulate the
>> document very efficiently and if you have graphics, mathematics and so
>> on
>> I've not seen anything better yet.
>>
>> How do you write a mathematic formulae in ReST??? I've never needed so
>> I
>> don'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.
I have not worked with ReST. I have worked with both TeX and asciidoc
quite a lot. Asciidoc is much simpler. But when it gets more complicated,
it is just as difficult to debug as TeX.
In fact, you often have to guess what it actually meant.
For instance:
This is a right-aligned paragraph.
-1 points for you
Is this '-' a bullet? Why not?
2*3=5, 2*4=8
Do the '*' above mark 'bold'?
Unlike TeX that used non-common characters for markup, ReST and its ilk
use common characters. Hence if you paste a text from somewhere, you will
have to escape a bunch of characters in it. Moreever, you probably won't
notice it for a while.
One interesting atvantage ReST has over most other markup languages is
that it mostly avoids characters that are mirrored in bidirectional
languages: (){}[]<> . This makes it useful for editing text that has
large portions of Hebrew, Arabic, or other bidirectional languages.
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