[lug] Free Linux Authoring Tools?

[Brennen Bearnes]

To the original question:

I used to advocate *TeX for this kind of thing, but while I still have a
lot of respect for it as a tool and ecosystem, I've drifted a lot more in
the direction of lightweight markup and simple tooling for most stuff these
days, plus Pandoc where I need to generate something besides HTML (it can
push through LaTeX to PDF, etc.).

I usually just write a little Makefile (frankly I don't understand make in
the least, but for basic "update this file by running this other thing"
tasks it just pretty much works) and a Perl script that invokes
Text::Markdown::Discount on one or more Markdown source files.

Here's more or less my starting point for any given booklike entity:

https://github.com/brennen/userland-book/blob/master/Makefile

For roughing out the tutorials I write at my day job these days, I do
something a little more streamlined but pretty much the same:

https://github.com/brennen/do-parse-migration/blob/master/Makefile

The main criticism of this approach is that I'm repeating myself a lot, and
it's all kind of ad hoc.  Possibly I will one day turn it into a reusable
tool (as I'm slowly doing with the pile of badly factored Perl that
generates my blog).  On the other hand, I don't mind tuning a small amount
of code on a per-project basis, and I like that I could replicate it in any
host language I felt like with an hour or two of hacking around.

About Markdown itself...  Well, I don't even _like_ Markdown that much, but
it's less typing than most full-fledged markup language syntax for most
things, there's a ton of library support, and I have to use it half a dozen
other places anyhow.  Counter to a lot of conventional advice about code
and the like, I do strongly recommend checking generated documents into
version control as you commit changes to the source, so that you can easily
retrieve known-good versions even if libraries/tooling get yanked out from
under you at some point in the future.

All that aside, you should definitely give Pandoc a look for transforming
between formats:

http://pandoc.org/

-- bpb
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.lug.boulder.co.us/pipermail/lug/attachments/20160313/ae8775b7/attachment.html>