[OS X TeX] Can I do my next book in TeX?

[David Derbes]

On Apr 28, 2014, at 3:33 PM, Alan Litchfield wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Just had a quick look through the free version. Congratulations on the book. I will see about getting the paper version.
> 
> I would have thought that book were achievable in LaTeX/TeX/XeTeX but in any case, I would probably have done it in FrameMaker.
> 
> So far as outputting to EPUB, there was some discussion on this on this list and texhax some time ago. Unless there has been some development work, I believe the consensus was that such a workflow does not exist. Elements may be cobbled to make a workflow.

I was part of that earlier discussion.

Long story, but: a friend and I retyped (in LaTeX) an old book to be reissued, Lillian R. Lieber's The Einstein Theory of Relativity. It sold reasonably well. The republisher, Paul Dry Books of Philadelphia, wanted to do an electronic version. They found a firm (or a person) who would do it but for quite a large sum of money. I thought it could be done in house, and asked in this forum. At the time, and I fear to this day, there is no good way to get LaTeX into epub. (I don't know if Paul Dry ever did the electronic version.) It's a little bit surprising given that we have MathJax (because, if I am not entirely delusional, the conversion of html into epub is pretty good via Calibre or other tools.) 

I don't know if anyone has the time and the expertise and the generosity to put together a tool that would pump out epub from a LaTeX source, but it's gotta be possible. 

Is there some way to get something like this done as crowd code / open source?

David Derbes, physics teacher
U of Chicago Lab School


> 
> I have experimented with a number of files with and without graphics, tables, etc. I found that Calibre produced passable results but nothing was as good as pdf. Simple text files are fine.
> 
> Interesting discussion here on Stack-exchange.http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1551/use-latex-to-produce-epub
> 
> Regards
> Alan
> 
> 
> On 29/04/14 8:03 AM, Gerben Wierda wrote:
>> Hello folks,
>> 
>> I just published Mastering ArchiMate - Edition II (See http://bit.ly/1iNacG8) and (as you might have recalled when I discussed this on TeX mailing lists 1.5 years ago) I was unable to do this layout-heavy book in TeX, so I did it in InDesign CS6.
>> 
>> I am planning another book which is more text-oriented. Actually. I already have written larger parts of it using ConTeXt. Now I have to decide what to use for final production. I would like to finish this in ConTeXt but I would also like to possibly output EPUB. I preferably do not want to use InDesign anymore.
>> 
>> Have work flows been devised to combine PDF production for print and EPUB from a TeX-based source?
>> 
>> Yours,
>> 
>> G
>> 
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> 
> -- 
> Dr Alan Litchfield
> AlphaByte
> PO Box 1941
> Auckland, New Zealand 1140
> 
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