How to write a book in Emacs

I wrote my first book in what was then Star Office, but everything since has been in Emacs and some sort of markup. I agree with the annoying variations Markdown. reStructuredText is, at least, predictable. I do still outline in org mode though.

It seems like anytime I interact with a traditional publisher, just like the editor in the article, they want MS Word. They then want to give me edits as Word change tracking.

My compromise is to go back and change my source and regenerate. It works, but at night, when the world is quiet and dreams are less threatened by reason, I imagine a world where editors send me patches or pull requests.

I'll have to try the method described in the article. That might be much better, but I'll have less chance of negotiating it than with a freelance editor.

I don't think there's a technical solution to this problem and certainly not a profitable one, because it's a matter of getting people who couldn't care less about diffs and source control to use unfamiliar tools for the benefit of someone they are paying.

I can't even get some developers to use source control.

Maybe GitBook will change minds.

Thank you so much for writing this. It is useful not just for Emacs users but to anyone who prefers writing their book in a text-based markup rather than Microsoft Word. It also explains how to collaborate with someone who uses Word exclusively.

Unfortunately, every tool has a quirk and we eventually need to settle on a workflow that somehow works, even though everything might be open source as you have described in the case of Pandoc. But I believe Emacs is the best authoring tool for books due to its versatility.

I also wrote a book in Emacs org mode. My plan was to do all the editing in emacs, and then design the layout in Adobe Indesign. I struggled a lot with several delirious XML-based solutions for this (e.g. Docbook), but finally I found out that a fine method is to use pandoc to directly convert org mode files to IDML (a markup format native to Indesign).

> Pandoc’s great — it really is. But I still had no end of trouble with it.

Now I haven't done anything really advanced with it - but from what I've done so far it's worked great. Being able to export to PDF and epub with the right formatting from the same document is huge leaps for me.

> First of all, there is no documentation.

Now I can't take the author seriously.

* https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/wiki

* http://pandoc.org/README.html

I'm not saying it's the most obvious tool to use - but with some digging I was able to figure it out.

> Ultimately I had to delve into the source to figure out why some things worked and other things did not.

Well...yeah. Pandoc isn't this magical thing that supports converting every possible format and niche feature back and forth without some sort of loss of style or formatting. Even tools like OpenOffice and LibreOffice have some formatting and style issues with the real Office tools.

For those interested in how the publishing industry operates (and it really is quite interesting) Charlie Stross has penned a number of articles over at his website, collected under the title "Common Misconceptions about Publishing".

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...

Including Why I [still have to] use Microsoft Word (even though I hate it) http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/11/cmap-why...

I've got a funny feeling there might have been a few that didn't get added to this list.

There's a bit longer piece on a related topic here: http://www.therandymon.com/papers/emacs-for-writers.pdf

Looked nice when I found it, but I'm not a writer and I can't judge how useful it can be.

"In Emacs, there are several modifier keys you can use, each with its own character:"

    ========   =========
    Modifier   Full Name
    ========   =========
    ``C-``     Control
    ``M-``     Meta ("Alt" on most keyboards)
    ``S-``     Shift
    ========   =========

That list is sorted incorrectly. It should be Esacape, Meta, Alt, Control, and Shift.

The author seems to be disappointed with aspell. I wonder if LanguageTool would have been a more adequate choice. I use it regularly before publishing documents.

AsciiDoc is an often overlooked markup format, which implements all features of DocBook. It is a perfect fit for writing a book. Markdown and reStructuredText were not designed with books in mind.

It's a pity that the popularity of Markdown made it hard for the author to even consider AsciiDoc. It wasn't even in the list of contenders.

"Enabling old-style numerals (lowercase numbers) [in LaTeX] is easy enough, right up until you want to only enable them in some parts your book."

I've seen people say that before, but I've never been able to get lowercase numbers myself. And in the past I've futzed with LaTeX a lot.

I give: how do you do it?

I'm writing Learning Akka for Packt Publishing using org mode w/ pandoc to convert it for the editors to work with. Org mode supports most anything - code, images etc.

Once the editors put it into packt format, then I'll continue editing myself. It's working well for me.

His point about Markdown is why Commonmark now exists. The guy who created Pandoc is one of the people who are working on it.

Perhaps using git would help too.

Preparing a manuscript in Emacs is like preparing a graphic design in GIMP.

Suck it up and use the tool that everyone else is using -- Word.