What do you use for authoring articles, documents and books?
Whilst editing NHibernate in Action, I've clocked up about 300 hours using Microsoft Word. Right now, my opinion is that this is not a great tool for book authoring.
Manning Press use one document per chapter, which makes sense because chapters seem to be the logical unit of work in a publishing workflow. However, when you want to quickly generate a Table of Contents, or see the index for the book, you have to start using word trickery (sub documents etc). Manning don't use any of those features, probably because they require lots of word skillz for all involved, and is error prone.
What surprises me is that Manning didn't ask me to work with some purpose built, advanced book authoring software that fits the publishing workflow perfectly. Does such a tool exist?
Martin Fowler writes some very interesting stuff about how he uses XML for authoring. PoEAA was the first book he tried this on. Sounds like managed to get a lot of leverage from this approach, although he did have to essentially devise his own tool chain.
Would be great if anyone can share their thoughts on this. Are there any authoring tools you use and love?
Comments
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Since I write for the same publisher, I know the pain you experience.
Word is clearly not what I’d call a joy to work with. It does have features that support the review process, but other than that it’s incredibly difficult to get the formatting just right, especially with code samples and screenshots, etc.
I’m interested in hearing what others do.
Pragmatic Press has an interesting take. I think you write the whole book in Textile format (or Markdown). Then everything gets generated off of that.
It would be nice to have hard links to code samples in a compiled form somewhere, so that when you update the sample, the text gets updated as well. Same thing for screenshots.
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I heard about your ASP.NET MVC in action book – I’m looking forward to that :)
The reviewing features in word are good, and Word has a lot of nice features. I particularly like the new default styling they’ve introduced in Office 2007 – it’s elegant.
Working in Markdown is something I’ve considered. It’s very interesting that the pragmatic folk are using this.
In fact, whilst researching options I stumbled upon MultiMarkdown – an adaptation that has additional formatting for books. This is also supported by Scrivener, a brilliant looking tool for authors.
I’ve so far collected about 30 links to various tools and options, I’m planning on doing a blog post about it soon.
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Hi Tobes, I was looking up your email address from work and happened on this blog entry. My brother Richard specialises in document management, and has reviewed and managed implementation of a number of systems for various customers. It might be worth dropping him a line:
http://www.techdocdirect.com/
Hope you don’t mind the blatant plug.
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My vote is for Scrivener, it’s a fabulous application.
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Ahh yes, Scrivener. It’s great!
I’m currently playing with Multimarkdown, Scrivener, MacTex and Git. Having a lot of fun with tweaking the XSLT to create the dream authoring system.