[lug] Free Linux Authoring Tools?

[Steve Litt]

On Sun, 13 Mar 2016 09:14:08 -0600
Davide Del Vento <davide.del.vento at gmail.com> wrote:

> TeX (and LaTeX) can certainly make everything you want, including
> automatic generation of ToC, automatic numbering and referencing of
> tables, figures and more. If you are already familiar with it (I am),
> it's easy, and the few things you may not know are easy to learn and
> add.

I have some questions for you Davide...

I love plain TeX because it's braindeadly simple, I could write it in
my sleep, and unless I use an awful lot of styles, I won't need to
insert many tags, and the tags I insert will be intuitively obvious.

Not only that, but with TeX' simple and obvious structure, it wouldn't
be to hard for me to write a semantic TeX to Xhtml converter that
**preserves styles rather than prematurely applying appearances**. Such
an Xhtml converter would support an ePub exporter that builds ePubs to
the specifications demanded by vendors like Amazon.

But in the past I've had trouble doing a book with TeX, because:

* Plain TeX only works with a small subset of fonts, most of them ugly
  and hard to read.

* Plain TeX has no environments, only macros. Environments can
  kinda-sorta be simulated by begin and end macros with \begingroup in
  the begin macro and \endgroup in the end macro, but I fear for what
  would happen in the very real case where I need to nest a character
  style inside a paragraph style that goes on for several paragraphs. I
  fear the \endgroup tags would collide instead of nesting politely.

One possibility would be to use LaTeX, but LaTeX is so complex and
quirky that I could *never* write a LaTeX to Xhtml converter, so I
could never derive semantically valid ePubs from LaTeX.

Do you have any ideas how to cure my two problems with Plain TeX? I'd
be eternally grateful.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
March 2016 featured book: Quit Joblessness: Start Your Own Business
http://www.troubleshooters.com/startbiz