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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Crossposting Tips

[ Crossposted from अनकही ]
Out of fun, in the past, I had created accounts for blogging on various hosting sites, ranging from wordpress to xanga. Now all that is unmanageable. Same is true for microblogging sites.
Now I want to consolidate them and make my content available everywhere. Solution is to cross-post the articles so that it is posted on one site and linked back to the original site. So, I created my own hosted wordpress site where I have extreme control. Then use different tools to distribute this content.

Two wordpress plugins come handy: twitter tools and posterize.

I configure posterize to post to my posterous account when I publish any post. From posterize, the post is distributed to my various blogs on wordpress.com, tumblr.com, blogger.com etc. using its autopost feature. Full details here: http://blog.prateek.in/2010/12/how-my-blog-posts-flow/

Twitter tools plugin is used to create a status update carrying only the title of the new post. This update is taken in ping.fm using RSS feed and the ping.fm distributes the status updates in its own set of microblogging networks. More details here http://blog.prateek.in/2010/12/how-my-status-update-flows/ . Remember to use bit.ly to shorten the URLs automatically before posting to twitter.

I will honestly say that I do not like this current arrangement, but currently, this is the solution I have. I will think of cleaning all this up in near future. Thanks to posterous and bit.ly for making it possible.

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Personal Book Publishing : Basic Windows Setup

[ Crossposted from अनकही ]

If you do not have time or courage to explore more elaborate options, Jaxe is for you. It is no frills excellent XML editor. When you start the editor, it presents an option to create a document of one of supported types. Docbook is one of the options. It is simple and straightforward, without any distractions.

What I really love about this editor is its XML capabilities. The editor knows from your document types what tags can be nested where. It helps you insert the allowed tags for that section of document, so you rarely make mistakes. Even after making a fool-proof correct XML (DocBook) document, you can validate the XML and be double sure. While inserting tags, it also presents options on that tag. You can even import any existing DocBook XML file and validate it.

Other stellar features include a built-in spell-checker, Equation editor and help to insert images. What I found lacking was: a simple icon which inserts the basic constructs like ordered lists, unordered lists, bold, italics etc.

Once your document is ready, In the file menu, there is a clear option to export to PDF. It cannot get simpler than that. What I found lacking was the missing option to generate HTML and ePub. However, PDF was my primary requirement and it did the job well.

This tool is excellent choice for quick work, no fuss solution. However, for making HTML and ePub output, I needed a more elaborate solution which I will describe in the follow-up article.

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