[scribus] epub from sla? or Scribus versus Lyx

[Meho R.]

On 25.07.2011 01:59, Owen wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Jun 2011 16:40:03 -0300
> Lila Pagola<lilapagola at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I guess this is a topic very well known by everybody in this list, but
>> I was searching at list's archives and with Google, and I can't find
>> real answers, and that's probably I'm doing the wrong question: Is it
>> possible to get a acceptable version in epub format, from a Scribus
>> design, or its pdf?
>>
>> I have being designing books with Scribus since several years, and
>> many people related to the projects have recommended me to use Lyx
>> instead of Scribus, specially regarding to its capability to easily
>> export outputs for different devices.
>
> I am a little late in this thread, but other than what has already been
> said, you may wish to consider Publican (most distros have it in their
> repositories)
>
> It is the Red Hat documentation vehicle, and has a bit of a steep
> learning curve, but the documentation is good
>
> The main advantages of Publican is that you can create html,pdf or epub
> and make facilities for translations. (Strangely, the pdf generation
> failed on F15, but was ok on Ubuntu-11.04)
>
> I created a "test" epub just to get my head around the program. I
> don't have an epub reader, though it "works" in Calibre. You can
> download it fromhttp://members.pcug.org.au/~rcook/scribus/Scribus.epub
> and feel free to use it as a framework of your own Scribus publications.
>
> In my view, creating epubs is hard work.
>
>
> Good luck
>
>
> Owen
I disagree: once you learn and follow basic principles, creating EPUB 
can be really a trivial task – sometimes done in only couple of minutes, 
although that depends on complexity of the book, of course. I mentioned 
a fantastic tutorial by Guido Henkel [1] yesterday, which shows how easy 
this process can be, and it involves only a simple text editor (or, if 
you like, a more advanced editors like Bluefish [2] and JEdit [3]), 
Calibre ebook manager [4], and determination to do things properly :-) 
There is also a full-blown WYSIWYG ebook editor called Sigil [4], but 
WYSIWYG approach can be problematic and unnecessary complicate things, 
though proper use of Sigil will lead to fantastic results...

Using Scribus (or any other application) to create a PDF file and then 
convert it to EPUB is, in most cases, wrong. Using LyX to export to HTML 
and work from there is just slightly a better situation (provided the 
export actually worked), but will almost certainly involve a lot of 
unnecessary work doing corrections which, if you started from scratch 
and did things properly in the first place, wouldn't have happened.

[1] http://guidohenkel.com/2010/12/take-pride-in-your-ebook-formatting/
[2] http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/index.html
[3] http://www.jedit.org/
[4] http://calibre-ebook.com/
[5] http://code.google.com/p/sigil/