[lug] Free Linux Authoring Tools?

[P. Hoemke]

I'm no expert, but I think this is probably a good case for Asciidoc format
and AsciiDoctor:

http://asciidoctor.org/

Write once, output variously.

YMMV, ¢2, etc.

Paul.

On Sunday, March 13, 2016, <stimits at comcast.net> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have the need to write a technical document which isn't a full book, but
> which is large enough it could use chapters, index, table of contents, so
> on (a structured document). It would be best if it could be exported to
> PDF, XHTML, plain text, and PostScript. I'm looking for authoring tools to
> do this from Linux.
>
> It seems that having the document in DocBook XML format would make
> structuring this for all of the different output types practical. There are
> tools to quickly produce any layout I want. The trouble is, I don't want to
> write a hundred pages by manually writing tags and codes, and would really
> like the table of contents to be dynamically generated based on chapters. I
> have not seen any free editors which could run on DocBook code under the
> covers, while giving a WYSIWYG display for whichever style sheet. Many
> people have used TeX and family for thesis and technical documents, but I
> suspect this also requires knowing the tags and macros (plus I don't think
> it supports automatic generation of a table of contents without writing
> code). I see Lyx, and I like this for simply laying out a page, but it
> becomes terribly manual at times when doing things like vertically
> centering text for a page cover...I'd prefer to mark the text as vertically
> centered, and then let a style sheet conversion decide how to do it (if at
> all). I could live with seeing plain text in some form of tree hierarchy,
> and then running separate conversion tools for final format, such as
> something half way between an XML code editor and plain text.
>
> Is there any advise anyone can give on Linux tools for structured
> authoring with subsequent conversion to multiple formats?
>
> Thanks!
>
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