Re: TeX as an eBook engine?

From: luigi scarso <luigi.scarso@gmail.com>
To: mailing list for ConTeXt users <ntg-context@ntg.nl>
Subject: Re: TeX as an eBook engine?
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2009 10:12:12 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <fe8d59da0912030112q760b939fj4012de4c388d3369@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <4B177DAC.80408@wxs.nl>

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl> wrote:
> Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:
>>
>> Am 2009-12-02 um 18:03 schrieb Otared Kavian:
>>
>>> For those on the list who didn't see this thread on XeTeX mailing list:
>>> How about ConTeXt and mkiv?
>>
>> Hm, your subject is a bit misleading - I thought you wanted to *create
>> eBooks* using TeX. That would be much more useful...
>> Even if some eBook devices can display PDF, AFAIK we still cannot create
>> the re-flowable variant (needs a XML stream, see other discussions about
>> tagged PDF or PDF/X).
>>
>> In one of the latest c't (German computer magazine) there was a nice
>> article on creating eBooks in Epub format (HTML based). Even if I don't
>> intend to buy an eBook device, it made me think again about using another
>> input language than TeX to create HTML, ConTeXt and whatever from one
>> source. Knut Lickert recently gave a talk on "Creole for LaTeX" (Creole is
>> an unified Wiki markup syntax), I'm still planning to use ReStructuredText
>> (Python's documentation syntax) - note to self: finally adapt that LaTeX
>> output filter to ConTeXt!
>
> Processing epub is rather trivial. On my machine I have a sample style and
> processign boils down to:
>
> context --ctx=x-epub --autopdf dickens-a-tale-of-two-cities.epub
>
> However, the main reason for not posting the style is that I have not much
> reason currently to work on it. Also, as epub is effectively just packaged
> html, one ends up with styles for each specific book ... you just don't want
> to know what mess is hidden in those epub files (for example i ran into
> using h2 for the chapter numbers and h3 for the chapter title).
>
Maybe epub as backend is a more interesting  idea:
given (some kind of gentle )  tex file one can produce an epub file as  result.

-- 
luigi
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