On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Hans Hagen
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