Hi Steve, Could you elaborate a bit on your pandoc/markdown comments? What kind of formatting is it that you find difficult/deficient. My impression is that it creates pretty clean HTML so that the formatting is via CSS.
I have been helping a friend produce travel diaries for his family and friends, aiming for a PDF and an ePub product from the same source. I doubt that my formatting requirements are as demanding as yours, but the results that we have had are pretty good. Of course, I wouldn't start from LyX/LaTeX to produce these things since the pandoc LaTeX -> HTML usually requires a lot of massaging. Cheers, Alan On Tue, 6 Nov 2018 at 08:46, Steve Litt <sl...@troubleshooters.com> wrote: > On Mon, 5 Nov 2018 00:36:13 +0200 > Dr Eberhard Lisse <nos...@lisse.na> wrote: > > > Steve, > > > > I fundamentally disagree about the relevance. > > > > LyX is a front end for LaTeX, not a document format. And it is a > > FANTASTIC front end, which can be twsited to do a lot of things :-)-O > > Sure, but LaTeX isn't the only game in town the way it was 10 years ago > (unless you took Docbook seriously a decade ago). Most new books are > ePubs or derivative mobis or whatever. > > > > > > pandoc can produce an epub from (reasonable) LaTeX (exported from > > LyX), which kindlegen can translate into mobi. > > Yeah. I've had hundreds of people recommend pandoc and XSLT and the > like. Have *you* ever successfully used pandoc to create HTML or ePub > or mobi formatted to your desires? If you have, you're one in five > hundred. Everyone recommends Pandoc, but finding people who have used > it is like finding a needle in a haystack, and when you find such > people and ask them how to do the conversion, they point you to > Internet sites with procedures that make installing Gentoo or Arch a one > click process. > > By the way, same thing goes for Asciidoc, Asciidoctor, Markdown, and > Multimarkdown. Evvverybody recommends it, but few have used it to make > books in which the author declares and uses styles. > > > For LaTeX there is lwarp at > > > > https://ctan.org/pkg/lwarp > > > > which also looks interesting. > > I wish I had a dime for every hour I spent, on solutions to this > problems, that "look interesting". 99% of them turn out to be > converters whose first step is to convert your styles into appearance, > guaranteeing garbaged up output. > > > > > > XML would be a great step, and not only for epub. But that would be a > > fundamental change, and who's going to do it? > > And that's where the rubber meets the road. Look back to the thread, > starting on 7/22/2008, subject "Progress on the MS Word to LyX > conversion". In that thread, against my warnings, by the way, several > top Lyx developers promised an XML native format for LyX 1.7x. Not > pidgeon XML. Not almost XML. Not halfassed XML. They promised XML. With > a DTD, no less. > > Now my position was that XML is much harder to parse with Unix core > utilities, so I was against it. But at least I figured that if it went > XML, I could find an XML parser to do what I had been doing. With much > more difficulty. But doable. > > But they went only half way, harming the inherent coreutils parsability > without enabling the file to be processed by an XML parser. > > If memory serves me, 1.6 already had some XML-ish changes to the native > format, I don't remember a 1.7, and 2.0 introduced the pidgeon XML we > know today. Over 7 years have elapsed since 2.0's introduction, over a > decade has elapsed since it was decided to have a well formed XML > native format validated with a DTD. > > Retina display and iOS and all this Apple compatibility is nice, but > I'll repeat, it's not 2008 and PDF is no longer the only game in town, > and I think priority should be placed on finishing what was started in > July of 2008. > > SteveT > -- Alan L Tyree http://www2.austlii.edu.au/~alan
