Sorry for the top posting, but this is short. My own view is that an ePub exporter for LyX would make it a killer application.
Thanks for your comments, Steve. Have you looked at Pandoc? Cheers, Alan Steve Litt writes: > On Fri, 31 Jan 2014 09:35:46 +0000 > Anthony Campbell <a...@acampbell.org.uk> wrote: > > >> This is for printed books. As regards conversion to ebook format, I've >> done this for several books on Smashwords, but that is quite a >> long-winded process because it has to be Word.doc format, which I do >> in LibreOffice (not much fun). Kindle does accept rtf, which would >> help, but as I'd already made Word.doc files I just used those. >> >> Anthony > > Ladies and gentlemen, if the preceding paragraph doesn't convince us we > need a good, solid, LyX to ePub and LyX to Mobi conversion (do ePub > first, you can convert ePub into Mobi), then nothing will. Instead of > slamming out his book in LyX, Anthony must use an outside service > (smashwords), meaning a two word modification is, as Joe Biden would > say, a Big Friggin Deal. Further, to satisfy Smashwords he must write it > in LibreOffice to simulate MS Word. Or, if he's just doing Kindle, he > can submit rtf (what could *possibly* go wrong). > > You can't base a LyX to ePub converter off either LyX2Xhtml or Alex's > eLyXer: Those produce great (X)html for stuff like footnotes and > bibliographies, but they discard semantic tags (h1-h6) for variously > named divs (yeah, <div>, not even <p>), as I remember they still use > outdated <a name="whatever"/> instead of giving an ID to a tag. One or > both of them does you the "favor" of renaming all graphic files to a > numerical sequence: I guess this is to prevent identically named > graphics in different directories from clobbering each other, but there > are better ways of doing this that don't have the anti-debugging > baggage of removing all meaning from graphic names. Current > LyX exported (X)html files just generally require *huge* > postprocessing, with zillions of special cases, to get them in > reasonable shape to make an ePub. If that were not the case, somebody > would have made a LyX2ePub a long, long time ago, because the demand is > there, and a lot of people have that itch, and I'm not the only one > who has tried to do it. > > Shamefully, because I need to be able to have my books available as > ePubs, after 13 years using LyX to write my books, I'm now using the > Bluefish editor to write my future books. I've written an Xhtml to ePub > converter in Python, and I can write an Xhtml to LaTeX converter just > as easily. But let me ask you something: Have you ever tried to slam > out 2500 words a day in Bluefish? Bluefish will never have the > authoring speed of LyX. But then again, as things stand now, a LyX > authored document will never be convertible to ePub. > > The shame is, in theory, LyX to ePub is simple. Every environment > becomes <p class="environmentname">, every character style becomes > <span class="charstylename">. Leave <div> out of it except for every > special cases. Even lyx-code should become <pre class="lyxcode">, not > <div class="lyxcode">. > > A special one-per-book configuration file (I did mine in YAML) defines > the assignment of Part, Chapter, Section, Subsection etc to <h1>, <h2>, > <h3>, <h4> etc, and defines which go in the table of contents, and > which get numbers and what prefix the number gets (Part, Chapter, etc). > I've already done this: It works. Don't worry about converting LyX > environment and char style defs to CSS, just list all paragraph and > char styles, so that the author can make the necessary CSS. CSS is > *much* easier to define than LaTeX environments and commands. And yes, > let the author know that this export requires the author use only a > subset of LyX's capabilities. > > I briefly considered writing Yet Another LyX to HTML Exporter, but > found out that in spite of LyX's native format being Non Human Friendly > XML, it's not *well formed* XML, so I can't use Python's lxml.etree, > let alone Python's xml.etree.ElementTree, to parse it. Perhaps if LyX > offered an export to well-formed XML, hopefully with a DTD, I could > parse that to produce ePub-friendly Xhtml, but as far as I know that > doesn't exist either. > > Anyway, I would suggest anyone who is working on any portion of a LyX > to ePub conversion talk with me. I'm pretty knowledgeable about ePub, > and I've already identified a lot of the dead ends and blind alleys in > ePub creation, and I know what parts of the LyX document should go into > the ePub, and which parts would be better re-done as either config or > CSS. > > My switch to Bluefish isn't cast in concrete: Once LyX contains a > good, generic, reliable LyX to ePub or even LyX to "ePub friendly" Xhtml > conversion, I can switch back. If you do it soon enough, I won't even > have to write an Xhtml to LaTeX converter :-) > > Thanks, > > SteveT > > Steve Litt * http://www.troubleshooters.com/ > Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance -- Alan L Tyree http://www2.austlii.edu.au/~alan Tel: 04 2748 6206 sip:172...@iptel.org
