On 1/30/06, Tantek Çelik <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > We need more instances of and better documentation and analysis of the > book-examples: > > http://microformats.org/wiki/book-examples > > I'll note that we're also fortunate to have Mark Pilgrim on the list, who > has very direct experience with publishing online versions of print books he > has written.
I added some more representative links to book-examples. As for briding the gap between web and print... in my (2-book) experience, the bottleneck is the publishers. I self-published Dive Into Python online for 4 years before Apress threw enough money at me to convince me to finish it, so I had *lots* of time to experiment and settle on a toolchain that produced passable HTML, PDF, and text. I wrote the book entirely in DocBook XML; Apress was entirely Microsoft Word-based. To send chapters to my editor, I transformed it to an intermediate HTML format and then wrote a Python script to tell Microsoft Word to load the HTML and save it as a native .doc file. (Yes, I am aware that's cheating. :) The editors had very few changes, so that stage went smoothly. The trouble started when we went to copyedit. My copy editor also only accepted Word files. She had a ton of smallish style changes, which I had to backport to the original DocBook XML files so I could publish the changes online. (This was allowed as part of my contract.) She also complained bitterly that the auto-generated Word files had lots of extraneous cruft in them, things which I never saw but which were apparent to someone who lives their life in Word. (I know how she feels, in reverse -- I cringe when someone takes a Word file and auto-generates HTML out of it.) We were never able to satisfactorily resolve them; she wasn't technical enough to know how to fix it, and I don't know enough about Word to know what she was talking about. Equal experts, different worlds. For my recent O'Reilly book, Greasemonkey Hacks, I asked if I could write it in DocBook XML, and my editor (the *wonderful* *marvelous* *talented* *underpaid* Brian Sawyer) got one of those "oh shit" looks on his face and recommended we do it in Word instead. So I wrote up 100 hacks in ASCII text files, then manually copied and pasted sentences and paragraphs into Word, and then manually formatted them to conform to O'Reilly's highly customized Word templates. (IIRC, O'Reilly has semi-automated processes to take these Word files and convert them to Framemaker.) At that point, I threw away the original text files and we all did edits, techedits, and copyedits entirely in Microsoft Word. I see that Rael finally finished his wiki-based submission web application for O'Reilly authors: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/01/the_long_snout.html I originally volunteered to be the guinea pig for this with "Greasemonkey Hacks", but Rael decided the system wasn't ready yet. I have heard unconfirmed reports that both Apress and O'Reilly did everything on paper until a few years ago (mailing edits around via Fedex, etc). So as icky as Microsoft Word sounds to this community, it was a big step forward for them in terms of computerization. Not sure where this gets us, except to say that Word is really leading edge stuff for publishers at the moment, and anything-but-Word is so bleeding edge for publishers that I'm skeptical that it's even worth spending any time on it. I'd be happy to use my existing online books and my battle-tested DocBook toolchain as a testbed for outputting semantically richer HTML with pretty CSS printing, but I don't believe that anyone but hobbyists will ever use it. I would, of course, be ecstatic to be proven wrong. -- Cheers, -Mark _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss