On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 10:19:03PM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Mon, 11 Jul 2016 16:00:55 -0400
> Hendrik Boom <hendrik@???> wrote:

> > But now that you appear to write books on Linux, may I ask what
> > software you use to do it?
>
> The only book I write about Linux is a "Learn Vim Tonight", and I don't
> recommend it. You can find better Vim books. I recommend my books on
> troubleshooting, Rapid Learning, and human performance.

I meant 'on Linux' to mean using Linux as a tool, not as a subject.

> In answer to your second question, my 1990 "Troubleshooting: Tools,
> Tips and Techniques" was written with WordPerfect 5.1. 1999 "Rapid
> Learning: Secret Weapon of the Successful Technologist" was written
> with MS Word (so sue me). My newest book, "Troubleshooting: Why Bother"
> was written in Bluefish and then converted to ePub via some Python
> programs I wrote.

I've not heard of Bluefish. I'll look it up.

>
> The other 7 were written in LyX.
>
> I've done some work on a text based native format to do the simpler
> stuff that LyX does, but do it in a write once, export everywhere
> manner. Sooner or later I'll switch my authoring over to that format.

I'm kind of curious about the format you seem to be designing or developing.
I've build a completely ad-hoc notation that doesn't satisfy me at all
any more. I'm looking to convert it to something else. The good
thing about it is that I *can* convert it, sonce I've implemented it
myself.

I'm tinkering with writing the project notes (as opposed to the main
text) in markdown, using omd, a rather fast markdown converter written
in OCaml) to convert it to html, ad then looking at the organisational
notes in a browser (currently Midori).

But the main text remains in the ugly ad-hoc notation.

I may have written a diatribe on the design of proper notations for
source text a while ago, long after I had developed the ad-hoc one.
ONe thing I have discovered is that it should be based on separators,
not wrappers. The Open Document types (used by OpenOffice) is based on
wrappers -- XML does bracckets all the time. I'll see if I can still
find that diatribe.

Oneof my requirements is that upon feeding the text through a revision
control system, possibly with seeral development branches, branch
merging will work cleanly -- if it fails to produce the intended
moerge, it should at least produce a file that the document handling
software can recognise and process meaningfully. t will still be up
the writer to do any appropriate corrections.t

One system I've looked at is scribble. It's part of the Racket
project, and seems to be designed by someone with a more than a few
neurons in is brain. Its idea is that Scribble is nothing but a
different syntax for Scheme, one that looks like a markup language
instead of a programming language, but the full power of Scheme is
still lurking there waiting to be used. But I find it a bit slow.
to format my novel takes long enough for me to get up and get a cup of coffee, so
to speak.


> The LyX project has dragged their feet maddeningly on a real, semantic,
> Xhtml export that can be used to make real ePub, as opposed to the
> pidgeon-ePub that fails validation tests and renders only on a small
> fraction of devices.

Wasn't the whole point of LyX to he a TEX editor? So that the proper
way for it to generate HTML would be to translate TEX to HTML? That
would be a daunting project, because TEX seems to be a lower-level
language than HTML.

> If an author is sure that he'll never need anything else but PDF
> output, LyX is by far the best. If the author might need ePub or other
> output formats, keep in touch with me.
>
> I think I answered your question, but if not, please ask again.

I hope to eenter a dialogue on these matters. Perhaps we can come up
with something better.

-- hendrik