What is the best tool to write a pretty-formatted technical ebook?
I 've been writing a tech book for a while, but I am still trying to find a tool which can help me to produce a pretty-formatted book as painlessly as possible.
I have tried several tools (Page.js, MS Word, Dr Ascii, several markdown editors) and most of them fall in 2 groups:
1- Very clunky, difficult to use and unreliable.
2.- Extremely basic formatting capabilities.
I just want to use something which can help me to produce high-quality books in both PDF and EPUB (think No-Starch Press, Manning ) without having to curse every 10 seconds. What has been your experience? Any tips?
Markdown + Sublime Text is something that works for me.
Our designer told me I should not worry about formatting and focus on the content instead. And that's what I do.
No matter whether I write a book, a blog post or any type of text, I use the aforementioned tools almost exclusively.
Markdown can be converted to many formats (PDF, HTML, Word, ePUB, etc.) easily with Pandoc or other tools.
On the other hand I understand that Markdown may be too basic for you. Particularly if you have some special formatting in mind. Just don't spend too much time searching for the perfect tool. It may not exist. ;)
Thank you, that has been my experience. Just this morning I spent like 2 hours chasing after latex package and I could not even upgrade the package manager due to some obscure bug.