hgbook on bitbucket; was: hgbook is broken?

[Arne Babenhauserheide]

Am Donnerstag 12 Februar 2009 06:18:24 schrieb Doug Philips:
> On Wednesday, February 11, 2009, at 11:28PM, Bill Barry indited:
> >Last I knew, PDF documents weren't searchable via the command line.
>
> I cannot speak to whatever platform you might be using or whatever tools
> you might have available. Having a plain-text form of the book does seem
> reasonable.
> Insisting that a plain-text form of the book must be HTML, debatable.
> Insisting that a plain-text form of the book must be HTML -because its
> always been done that way- seems inflexible as well.

When I browse the web, I want (X)HTML sites. 

Reasons: 

* HTML is better integrated than PDF. Everytime when I'm forced to use Windows 
in University (for printing conveniently) I am stumped by how bad the 
integration of PDF into Internet Explorer is. Some of my shortcuts suddenly 
don't work anymore in a PDF. 
* A well written HTML website is faster and far smaller than PDF. 
* I can use "links/links2/lynx/netrik" when I manage to break my X server. 
* Regardless of the platform I use, there will be an HTML reader. 
* I can just bookmark a chapter, or link to a chapter from my website. 
* Google finds the individual chapters (I don't remember how often I already 
googled for "mercurial hooks" to go to the hooks chapter in the book :) )

Still I like having a PDF around, too. 

Reasons: 

* I can more easily copy it around locally. 
* I can annotate it. 
* It looks nicer when I print it. 


So I'd say, please stop talking about "HTML or PDF" and start talking about 
"What's the best way to create HTML _and_ PDF?"


The ideas we already have is 

* LaTeX
* Docbook
* reStructuredText

... and what I use for HTML is Markdown, because it would for example turn 
this E-Mail into nice to read HTML :) 
- http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

And google says ( :) ) that pandoc can turn markdown into pdfs: 
- http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

Pandoc can also turn (subsets of) LaTeX into HTML, so that might also be a 
viable way to clean up the mess. 

Using LaTeX as base for the book gives Mercurial a definitive plus in the 
scientific community. 

Best wishes, 
Arne
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