Re: Sigil

[Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com>]

On Sun, 24 Aug 2014 10:08:19 +0200
Morten Bo Johansen <mbj@spamcop.net> wrote:

> On 2014-08-23 Steve Litt wrote:
> 
> > If any of you writes ePubs, you're probably familiar with Sigil, at
> > least for partial conversions and touchups. But if you haven't used
> > Sigil for awhile, you might not be aware that it's really grown up
> > in the past two years, to the point where it's a reasonable ePub
> > authoring environment. 
> 
> I would also point you to asciidoc. Not that I have tried it,
> but from the description and examples, it looks promising:
> 
> http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/publishing-ebooks-with-asciidoc.html
> 
>   
>   Morten

Thanks Morton,

AsciiDoc has lots of potential for lots of things. For starters, it
translates to Docbook, from which you can generate many outputs using
XSLT. Also, it has no tags, making authoring easier than using
something like Bluefish. It looks like it would be an outstanding
choice for many usages, especially simple books in which additional
styles aren't necessary.

My 10 minute look at the AsciiDoc website makes me think it wouldn't be
good for authoring a book for sale. I see no way of inserting
unanticipated styles. For instance, there's a "story" paragraph style
in every book I write, used when a character or the narrator tells a
story. The different formatting of the story style prevents a lot of
reader confusion that would otherwise pop up.

I can't say that AsciiDoc doesn't allow customization of existing
styles, because although AsciiDoc itself offers no such facility, you
can customize existing styles through XSLT, or in the case of ePub, a
CSS stylesheet. So my main objection on styling is the inability to
create arbitrary paragraph or character styles.

AsciiDoc can do a lot with appearances, but with styles it's very
limited, and for styles-based authoring, that's not a good thing. See
this:

http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/bluefish/#a_structured_document

Keep in mind also, that although AsciiDoc can represent a large number
of predefined styles, actually using all of them requires memorization
of some pretty arcane AsciiDoc constructs. In other words, learning
AsciiDoc to the extent you'd need to do substantial formatting isn't a
lot easier than learning CSS.

The other problem with AsciiDoc is something you'd appreciate only if
your job involves writing 2500 words per day into long documents. When
it comes to authoring speed, WYSIWYG helps. A lot. When operating in a
text environment, it's very easy to lose your place, requiring the
question "where am I" and a probable text search. During all that, you
lose your train of thought, setting you back minutes. Many times per
day.

With WYSIWYG, a single glance lets you know where you are and reminds
you what you need to do, and you do it and continue working. No lost
time.

For a document with very modest formatting needs, such as the Anna
Karenina sample on the AsciiDoc site, AsciiDoc is an excellent choice.
For styles-based authored documents with more demanding formats, my 10
minute perusal of the website tells me AsciiDoc falls short.

Thanks,

SteveT

Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
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