Ask HN: What software should I use to write a textbook?
I will be delivering it as a PDF and thinking about printing a version in the future. What are the best software solutions for this?
I’d recommend ConTeXt [0] over LaTeX. A minimal document is as simple as
\starttext
Start writing here…
\stoptext
The documentation is possibly its weak point: it’s rich and comprehensive, although somewhat sparse and at times heavily technical. But it’s worth the effort, IMHO.
You may get inspired by the TeX showcase [1] (not only ConTeXt, but also LaTeX and plain TeX).
[0] http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page [1] https://www.tug.org/texshowcase/
If I was going to compare them to commerical software, ConTexT is closer to InDesign and LaTeX is closer to Word.
With a graphical tool, one is limited to the automation which the developers are willing to build into the tool and sentenced to handling manually everything else, every time that there's a change, e.g., if you have a keyword block on your opening article pages aligned against the outside gutter and the layout program can't place it automatically and contextually, then every time the article changes from opening to a left to a right or vice-versa one has to make that change manually.
I wrote up a longer comparison once upon a time --- Scribus isn't that much different from InDesign and Quark, so the criticism holds:
While I'm no TeX wizard, I prefer it because it allows one to off-load some of the tedium and repetitiveness to the computer, as opposed to repeatedly solving variations of the same problems by hand time after time after time.
So,
* using Quark is like being chained to a an oar which is covered w/ splinters and mostly broken at the other end and which will randomly break due to being poorly carved (Quark has crashed on me 183 times this year) leaving one adrift or run aground, or sometimes returning the vessel to its starting point (a few of those crashes have resulted in unrecoverable document corruption --- my autobackup folder may contain 2 or 3 GBs of files for a given iteration of a particular project each month) --- the oar can be smoothed somewhat and reinforced (by purchasing or finding XTensions, using XTags &c.) and periodically one is required to purchase a new oar (sometimes just after the previous one has been customized adequately). For some tasks, one can impress any graphic designer as a galley slave to ease the effort for others, but while charts are available, there are no automagic navigation options and every journey must be manually piloted.
* using InDesign is pretty much the same except the oar is smoother and stronger (it's crashed 29 times on me thus far this year), there aren't as many customization options and it's not quite as easy to find a candidate for impressment (though soon it'll be as easy as for Quark). Charts are available, but again, piloting is strictly manual.
* using Plain TeX one has to craft the vessel's oar oneself (as well as the rest of the vessel unless one is typesetting a clone of The TeXbook), but it's as sturdy and as nice a one as one's skills allow and can even be an engine which moves the vessel in and of itself --- it can be difficult or impossible to find people suitable to help w/ either carving the oar or using it though, but once a given journey is worked out, the oar becomes magical and rows for itself except for when one runs into an unplanned for obstacle (the navigation charts are old ones and not often up-dated, with a lot of “terra incognita”), allowing one an auto-pilot option for certain journeys, dependent upon one's skill. using ePlain, an oar is provided, can be customized, and can be enchanted and the charts are okay, but have a lot of “terra incognita” on them.
* using LaTeX, an oar is provided and there're lots of nifty customizations and improvements already available, and one can impress additional oars from CTAN, however on a semi-random basis, adding one oar will break other oars, sometimes leaving one adrift or run aground. One can enchant a set of oars to accomplish a given journey, easing the piloting requirement, and the navigation charts are decent and obstacles are fairly well-known.
* using ConTeXt, a very nice oar is provided, which has lots of customization options, but the navigational charts aren't easily read by a traditionally trained navigator at first, although they are fairly compleat and most journey can be carefully worked out, but once one is, it is quite automatic and there's a good auto-pilot option.
If you are going to make things in Indesign, it should be as a last step process, after the full draft has been made. Otherwise you will slow down your writing by a lot.
Quark is rather outdated IMO, little has changed over the years. It has terrible UI and native keybind controls
I would use some flavor of markdown + some notetaking tool that supports it. A good example would be gitbooks.io, there's other ones out there too.
Latex & Variants is what has always been used for textbooks. Can't go wrong with it
I think works really well for textbooks, with well-placed footnotes, sufficient margin space to make notes, etc.
There are, of course, many other styles, if you do not wish to utilize page area more efficiently.
---
If you need nice equations (or even just Greek alphabet), and a no-hassle reference linking system, I can't think of anything other than TeX derivatives that will do a good job.
PS: If OP wants more useful suggestions, we need to know the topic and/or what kind of content the book will contain -- text, equations, floats/figures, photographs, etc.
Check a tutorial for the basic workflow and you are all set.
Many people have used it and still use it for their books, theses and such. I wrote my thesis with it back in the days. The best part was to be able to just focus on the writing, not formatting.
There is a layout mimicing the layout used by Edward Tufte in his books. That layout is awesomely readable (a highly subjective observation, I know).
I see this 'slogan' frequently when it comes to Tex-based editors. (I realize you are talking about a GUI interface that only uses Tex as its backend... comment isnt really directed to you.)
Is the slogan really true? Perhaps I'm just easily distracted, but I find the exact opposite is true. I spend 1% of the time drafting, and 99% of the time fiddling with Tex, loading packages to make a cool kind of ligature, then ending up reading about the history of ligatures, then writing my own package to create a ligature more consistent with those used in 17th century upper Bavaria, then adding more features to the package to account for monospaced fonts, etc... and finally, at around 4:00 am, I realize I've only written a single sentence.
Maybe it's just me... but the slogan seems like something an alcoholic in denial would say.
In your case, it seems you are not really writing the text... You are making cosmetic adjustments. And it is fine but it should not be done up front, IMO. As for ligatures, TeX should handle ligatures automagically, but I took that as a general point and yeah, I agree -- one can always find things to tweak.
Process-wise, it is better to "just write". Most of the cosmetics is taken care of by LyX with minimal effort. Add a comment for something to check later. Make the process iterative, if you try to write each line as production quality from scratch, I doubt you will ever finish.
For pure composition, you are certainly correct... do not write in the Tex editor... Just compose with WORD or something, and then take care of the formatting in Tex at the end.
(Regrettably, though, I am involved in several projects where the composition necessarily has to be in the LaTeX editor as the format and cosmetic adjustments are very important.)
It seems a lot of the helpful questions and answers on the various LaTeX websites come from some PhD student working on his dissertation. I kind of smile with sympathy at their earnest questions about how to print an equation upside-down and backwards in a table cell while using multicolumn (just a silly example...) I know whoever was writing the question was, like me, surfing the internet and focusing on formatting instead of getting back to work and finishing the damn dissertation.
You can write your text in Markdown and convert it to TeX, DocBook or directly to PDF using Pandoc (https://pandoc.org). In my opinion Markdown is much easier to type and Pandoc gives you everything you'll need for styling your document.
I usually start a writing project in pandoc Markdown, until at some point I have many equations, figures, or tables that I have to switch to LaTeX to continue. I know pandoc can support all of these elements but it does not give you as much freedom as LaTeX. Equation and theorem numbering, figure and subfigure referencing, fine tuning the layout of a table ... things like these that are natural in LaTeX require extra effort to be done well in Markdown. And of course, there are things that LaTeX does not do well naturally, for example, code highlighting. Should always pick the right tool for the right task.
One of the benefits is that you can convert a chapter to a webpage and gauge interest in the book itself.
Simple markdown or similar to have a rough structuring/formatting that there are many good editors and presenters for today. Then do a pass through with LaTeX or Word or whatever to (LaTeX may be more appropriate for certain technical documents) after you've written up the content.
I also find it useful to create a new file for each chapter.
It is the easiest syntax for equations, but not everyone needs those. It does look better than Word, but it is a very high cost for a bit of good-looking.
If you get distracted by the formatting and looks during the writing process, then just limit yourself to the basic Latex commands (\section, \emph, etc.).
The author of the package, Matthew Butterick, wrote several books with it, such as
- Practical Typography: https://practicaltypography.com/
- Beautiful Racket: https://beautifulracket.com/
Looking at the results, I can't help but be impressed. If I was writing a book, I would start here.
I think you can get it to output LaTeX which you can then use to generate your final PDF and ePub, if you like.
Previous HN discussion here with some other real-world users chiming in with their experiences: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15335010
However... for something simple, I'll point to https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/ I've found that Visual Studio Code + https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Flixs.vs... make for a lovely editing experience. Basically, you write plain text, hit ctrl-s and see formatted HTML in a side panel. The homepage explains how to generate PDFs.
Here's some notes about fancy typesetting from someone who wrote a book using Markdeep: https://imaginary-institute.com/resources/MarkdeepToInDesign...
https://www.glassner.com/portfolio/deep-learning-from-basics...
As another examples Google's Filament PBR renderer has beautiful documentation written in Markdeep as well: https://google.github.io/filament/Filament.md.html
If it's "too complex", you may be interested in reStructuredText, a stricter and more complete alternative to Markdown, that auto-converts well into LaTeX.
Once the writing is done, you have something you know makes the formatting fight worth waging. That way, the half-hour you'll spend finding a bloody compromise for some problem won't be cutting into your writing.
Markdown lets you focus on content and structure, pandoc creates a PDF of it by using latex, which you can later use to define how the text shall be printed (twosided? Us legal/a4/a5? Title, author,... ) and gives you latex formatted text, which is always correct & professional.
Pandoc also allows tables and images in markdown.
I think it depends on author mentality somewhat. Word works well for some, Latex for others.
It might also be worth considering Markdown or plain HTML. Particularly if an ePub/kindle version is a possibility.
Then convert it to the format you want to use for formatting and layout.
I wrote about my experience writing a book on Emacs in Emacs here, and the tooling I used [1]
[1] https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/how-to-write-a-book-i...
You can write the text either as Markdown or LaTeX, and softcover will build PDF, HTML, ePUB, mobi versions of the book for you.
It's the only ePub generation strategy that I know of that doesn't butcher the math.
The hardest part in long form copy is getting the content written. Anything visual on top is just distraction that will get in your way and slow you down.
Once you've the copy, use Pandoc or equivalent, and then typeset and format using a more sophisticated medium as needed.
A good starting point for primarily text or text+pics is whatever editor you like to use everyday. Once your content is final (or nearly so) you can export as ascii and then add latex (or variant) formatting.
If it is heavily equation oriented, there are a number of wysiwyg type latex editors that may be helpful or just bite the bullet and start as a latex text document.
Then I switched to Leanpub.com and never looked back. With Leanpub markdown you can still use Latex for formulas.
I love to write and Leanpub takes almost all of the hassle/overhead out of the process.
I write all my books with Markdown and Git/GitHub [1] and release them eventually on Leanpub [2]. Even if you don't want to release the book on their platform, you can take away the output files and publish them somewhere else (e.g. own platform, Amazon).
- [0] https://leanpub.com
- [1] https://github.com/the-road-to-learn-react/the-road-to-learn...
I'd say, go with the simples you can find (maybe even LibreOffice Writer).
Worry about layout and imagination later.
Make sure the tool you use doesn't get in the way of actually writing the book.
I also wrote a PhD thesis. I started with various msword compatible formats (for process reasons). I curated the documents into markdown and was hoping to use markdown/citeproc to produce a thesis via either msword or latex. However that was going to be a pain in the bum, so I finished it up with latex/hyperref/bibtex.
So, tl;dr I think if your book is not citation or maths heavy and you are in control of the process I would recommend markdown to latex via pandoc. If it’s citation heavy,then I’d probably recommend cutting out the pandoc middleman and going straight to latex/bibtex. If it’s maths heavy then markdown to latex might work. If it’s someone else’s process, I recommend jury rigging something that will get them an MVP.
Yikes