I wrote a school textbook in asciidoc. It was a wonderful tool to use but it soon became rather painful and I wish I had used something more lightweight. 30s build times are misery for tweaking.
Whatever was going on in the background — Prawn::PDF or something — was very slow about churning PNGs to format them into a PDF. I added some build logic to make “draft” PDFs with low res PNGs to speed things along, but it felt messy.
Ultimately, I wish I had authored with HTML and CSS instead. Markdown isn’t a document format — it’s a means to creating HTML, sort of like an IDE except you write in test instead of use a specific editor runtime. The beauty is being able to drop HTML into your markdown and not have the processor trip over it. <aside>, <figure> etc all because first class entities as opposed to by products of some arbitrary ascii syntax fencing, and it brought me closer to the resultant HTML that made formatting with CSS much easier (in a later, much smaller project.)
Print CSS is still very challenging unless you have the budget for Prince. You can do a lot if you give up hope of having everything happen automatically a la LaTeX. When you focus on the content over the formatting, these worries tend to evaporate.
What's your opinion on doing it not "a la LaTeX" but actually in LaTeX? I mean, for writing the bulk of initial core text it's not much different than Markdown, but when you do get to the typography stage then it has all the things needed for the print layout.
Never written a book, but I have written a few reports in Latex, and I would say it is a miserable experience. Slow build times, horrible error messages, and so much markup for everything.
I have taken the stance that all writing should happen in Markdown/Asciidoc/Pandoc/whatever minimal flavor you like and once content is complete, then port everything to Latex if necessary. Pandoc can spit out a reasonable .tex file you can then massage into a final product.
I never wrote a book, but I wrote my dissertations (100+ pages each), resumes or any other article in Latex, using Miktex. It wasn't the best experience UI-wise and until I learned proper Latex (which I now have forgotten) the error messages were shit. But the build times with quick builds and splitting stuff in chapters was actually a great experience for me. Maybe it's 'rosy retrospection' or I've been out of the loop with the current happenings in typesetting but if tomorrow I need to start writing a technical book, I'd still pick Latex.
Whatever was going on in the background — Prawn::PDF or something — was very slow about churning PNGs to format them into a PDF. I added some build logic to make “draft” PDFs with low res PNGs to speed things along, but it felt messy.
Ultimately, I wish I had authored with HTML and CSS instead. Markdown isn’t a document format — it’s a means to creating HTML, sort of like an IDE except you write in test instead of use a specific editor runtime. The beauty is being able to drop HTML into your markdown and not have the processor trip over it. <aside>, <figure> etc all because first class entities as opposed to by products of some arbitrary ascii syntax fencing, and it brought me closer to the resultant HTML that made formatting with CSS much easier (in a later, much smaller project.)
Print CSS is still very challenging unless you have the budget for Prince. You can do a lot if you give up hope of having everything happen automatically a la LaTeX. When you focus on the content over the formatting, these worries tend to evaporate.