[LINK] RFI: Cross-Media Publishing under Linux/OO

[Tom Worthington]

On 04/08/11 19:32, Paul Bolger wrote:

> ... have you looked at Lyx? It's a wysiwyg
> LaTEX editor which produces rather nice looking PDFs or which can also
> produce html ...

After the discussion of cross media publishing in Link, I installed the 
Lyx WYSIWYG Latex editor, which was easy (apart from working out which 
extra conversion packages you will need): http://wiki.lyx.org/

Lyx looks like a word processor and produces very elegant typeset 
output. But the conversion from HTML was disappointing, as all my 
hypertext links disappeared. Also if there are any syntax errors in the 
HTML, then the conversion stops. This is a problem as the HTML I am 
converting is an e-Book from the Moodle Learning Management System, 
which produces HTML with errors in it.

The OpenOffice to LaTex conversion included hypertext links and worked a 
bit better than HTML to LaTex.

> learning curve is steep. ...

Not so much steep, as vertical. If you are happy with the defaults, then 
Lyx is okay. But as soon as you want to do something like have the front 
matter of your book with roman numerals for page numbers, you are out of 
the WYSIWYG interface and back to inserting magic codes into the text.

I have decided Lyx is too hard and have reverted to my previous process 
of using the HTML from Moodle to create the EPUB version of the book. 
For the print editions I have an OpenOffice.Org master document and then 
import the same HTML chapters as used in EPUB as sub-documents (the 
sub-documents inherent the print formatting from the master document).


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
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Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra