hgbook on bitbucket

Doug Philips dgou at mac.com
Thu Feb 12 17:14:09 CST 2009


On or about Thursday, February 12, 2009, at 05:10PM, Christian Ebert indited:
>* Matt Mackall on Thursday, February 12, 2009 at 15:49:09 -0600
>> I also don't think it (or reST) is up to the demands of making a
>> well-typeset book with lots of pretty pictures and diagrams of the kind
>> a major publisher would put in bookstores. And that's what we're aiming
>> for, folks.
...
>I don't see a really well typeset book and html coming from the
>same source. The media differ too much. Almost like making a
>movie from a book. The logical structure, and logical markup
>approach may be similar, but all conversions I've seen so far are
>a compromise and smell of it.

My first reason for starting all of this was to suggest that perhaps HTML might be a complication not worth worrying about since PDFs are so widespread that even non-programmer-computer-literate-people know how to use them (i.e. using PDF does not limit one's audience the way it did even 3-4 years ago).

My second reason was to get out into the open what the goals for book formatting were, esp. if the process could be simplified as per my first reason above.


>That being said, it's Bryan's book, it's phantastic, and it's his
>decision how to screw it up ;-)

Yes, it is. And from the looks of the changesets on the repo he posted, that work was already under way. My hope was to suggest that one not put good effort after bad (sunk cost) if the HTML-monkey-on-the-back could be avoided. :)

-Doug


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