Friday, December 17, 2010

Personal Book Publishing : Advanced Windows Setup

[ Crossposted from अनकही ]
Last time I described how a basic windows setup can be created. That can be used to create  a DocBook XML file and convert to PDF in an easy way. Since my requirement was to also generate HTML and ePub, that setup was not sufficient. Also note that I always preer and suggest open-source tools to be used.

For this advanced windows setup, I have installed Dobudish. This provides the complete setup to work on DocBook. You just need to download the archive and extract in a folder. Say your new book name is "New Project", then go to the install folder and give the command:

generator.bat new_project create book

This will create a new DocBook XML file of the type book in the directory documents/new_project/input/ . You can create the project of any suitable name using this command. This is just a template file. You need to open this file in a text editor or XML editor and fill in the content. You can even use Jaxe (in earlier post) to edit this. Or you can use any other good editor like Notepad++ to edit. This is your choice.

Here I would like to tell you that you need to maintain the structure of this file. The tags are not to be removed. If you need to add more paragraphs, for example, you need to add a pair of <para> tags, just like it exists already. If you use a good XML editor like Jaxe, you need not worry about this. Once you have done editing the XML file and your book is complete, you can use the following commands:

generator.bat new_project pdf

generator.bat new_project html

generator.bat new_project epub


To create PDF, HTML and ePub automatically. The output files are located in documents/new_project/output/ . The output documents are very pretty. I have been using Jaxe along with Dobudish and am extremely happy with the results.

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