Re: [school-discuss] Digital textbooks

[Marc Lijour <marc@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sunday 12 July 2009 13:27:49 Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> > a) What kind of authoring environments are available?
> In the proprietary world, Adobe InDesign reportedly produces good epub
> but may be short on workflow tools.
>
> But right now the choice of FOSS epub-specific tools is pretty sparse,
> and the ones that exist are fairly ... raw. As I mentioned in another
> mail, my currently most-used tool is the  Quanta XML-development
> environment. But that's a very powerful, general purpose tool that's not
> really acceptable IMO for inflicting on authors or editors.

One approach would be to use OpenOffice.org with formatting guidelines (using 
specific styles for headers and content). OpenOffice.org's format (ODF) is XML 
and quite simple to parse and to transform with XSLT. But OpenOffice.org also 
saves documents as DocBook (XML) and HTML (notably without too much mess, 
unlike some competing products).

> Right now I'm thinking that heavily-templated ODF might be better for
> some as a single source document, leaving epub as more of a distribution
> system than a base format. But that opinion may change as I get deeper
> into this. I'm still learning daily about the format and its potential.

Same idea. If ePub is the way, it might be interesting to work on an export 
filter for OOo.