Authoring and Publishing (e)Books

Author Message

Terje J. Hanssen

Sunday 03 April 2005 4:44:19 pm

I wonder if eZ publish is suited for and can be used to author and publish "whole" (e)Books for screen and hardcopy presentations?
My question is because I have only seen articles mentioned in the text content examples, while I wish to test eZ publish for a possibly book project for a local "Farms and Genealogy history".

The OASIS "DocBook XML Document Type" is one establish standard for authoring and publishing technical docs and books (the Open eBook structure spec is another):
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/specs/cd-docbook-docbook-4.4.html#s.intro

According to "DocBook: The Definitive Guide"
http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/ch02.html#ch02-logdiv

the Logical Divisions and the Categories of Elements in DocBook are:

Sets
Books
Divisions, which divide books into parts
Components, which divide books or divisions into chapters
Sections, which subdivide components
Meta-information elements
Block elements
Inline elements

Will it be possible or a heavy job to use something like the DocBook xml tag set with eZ publish for book content and design?
Possibly other suggestions?

Bård Farstad

Wednesday 20 April 2005 1:11:47 am

Hi Terje,

You can use eZ publish to store information like this. Take for example look at the documentation done in eZ publish.

However you should split the book up in several smaller pieces. E.g. every chapter and sub chapter should be made as a separate object. This will enable simpler navigation and simpler management of content parts.

You can make this work with an import/export to docbook, but this does not exist and has to be written.

--bård

Documentation: http://ez.no/doc

Ekkehard Dörre

Wednesday 20 April 2005 1:41:36 am

... or you can use the new open office extension (beta) and convert via openoffice. All content is stored in ez in xml, so writing an export extension is "easily" possible.

Greetings ekke

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Bård Farstad

Wednesday 20 April 2005 3:01:25 am

Ekkhard,

you're right. I forgot about the OOo extension ;)

--bård

Documentation: http://ez.no/doc

Terje J. Hanssen

Wednesday 20 April 2005 5:55:06 pm

Yes, I have also assessed OpenOffice writer as an emerging, key authoring tool. Others may know better, but for me so far it looks like eZ publish is best suited for web publishing of the various parts written with OOo.

When we talk about a whole book or a set of books that also should be published on papers (hardcopy), they will typical need created table of contents (with toc.depth), chapter and section numbers, page numbers and indexes. I haven't seen that eZ publish can do this during the pdf generation process.

This can be created with OpenOffice in addition to create and work with master documents and subdocuments, features suited for working with long documents like books. OpenOffice can also export to pdf directly.

Another possibility I have waited for should mature, is the preliminary OpenOffice projects to use OpenOffice as an xml editor for DocBook. Using this Docbook filter and tools it might be possible to read and write docbook xml format. Docbook to pdf is well suited for book production:
http://xml.openoffice.org/xmerge/docbook/temp_test_only.html
http://de.openoffice.org/doc/sonstiges/docbook-user-guide-de.pdf

Terje J. Hanssen

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