Hi all, 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.
As opposed to LyX, whose best offering is an hour or two of intense fixing up from the HTML export of LyX and its ePub result, which for practical purposes requires maintaining two separate sources for your book. Also, a LyX produced ePub has the "look" of a LyX produced PDF, which isn't really what you want. And if you actually look at the ePub's HTML, it's horrible, semi-semantic pigeon-HTML. Sigil can't produce PDF/paper output as is: I would need to write some programs to convert it to TeX or LaTeX, etc. This is no mean task, but it's *a lot* easier than writing a LyX to ePub or LaTeX to ePub converter, because you can make Sigil produced ePubs valid XML, meaning you can use a Python XML parser on them, and then just convert XML styles to LaTeX environments and commands. I'm soooo over LyX, the book writing software I've used since 2001. The project has repeatedly made it clear they're not the slightest bit interested in grown-up ePub output, and it's my tough luck if I don't like the two hour Rube Goldberg conversion to pigeon-HTML they feature. I'll be going either with Sigil, or with a $400 commercial program called XMLMind (sometimes called XSE): http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/ XMLMind authors in Docbook, which is the perfect semantic native format, and from what I understand, offers a "wordprocessing" view conducive to high speed authoring (visible tags and one font text just don't cut it if you're trying to punch out 2500 words per day). Another good thing about XMLMind is I can learn Docbook authoring in XMLMind, and then later when I'm more proficient, I can switch to other tools. But of course, Sigil plus a few home-grown conversion programs would be a great authoring environment too. Right now I'm evaluating both Sigil and XMLMind. In summary, Sigil has grown into an excellent ePub authoring tool, whether for fix-up or for writing a book from scratch. If any of you has questions about Sigil, please feel free to ask me. SteveT Steve Litt * http://www.troubleshooters.com/ Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140823105445.7ed47...@mydesq2.domain.cxm
