[scribus] epub from sla? or Scribus versus Lyx

[Meho R.]

On 25.07.2011 14:46, Gregory Pittman wrote:
> This is a great distortion. I'm not going to advocate a PDF to ePub 
> process, but this one you outline as simple is far from it. What it 
> requires is a great deal of knowledge of making HTML, with the use of 
> styles, and many other features as outlined by Mr. Henkel. This is no 
> small task, and one has to be ready to do all of this manual tagging 
> to make it work.
>
> Mr. Henkel seems also to be talking about a book which is almost 
> entirely text. As soon as one wants to begin adding graphics and 
> having them placed in particular ways in relationship to the text, 
> there is much tweaking to be done, and my experience is that the final 
> appearance in some ebook reader is still a bit iffy.
>
> The easy part here is using calibre to convert an HTML file to ePub, 
> but this is easy also with the method that Owen has outlined. Once 
> again, the challenge is making your text with all of the proper 
> HTML/DocBook markup.
>
> Greg
Well, how great deal of knowledge is required depends on how complex the 
book is. But this is true for any app or method out there. You can 
create some basic documents in LyX without knowing anything about LaTeX 
and without any tweaking, but it will be nothing spectacular in terms of 
(typographic) quality; if you want a high-quality output, or custom 
design, you'll not be able to avoid learning at least basics of LaTeX 
(although basics sometimes wouldn't be enough). Same goes for Scribus: 
if you want high-quality output, you'll most certainly have to, e.g., 
use styles consistently throughout your document, use master documents, 
pay attention to fonts etc. You can, of course, avoid all this and 
format everything manually, but at the end it'll require more work and 
cause frustrations which could be avoided if things were done correctly 
from the beginning. Creating e-books isn't different. There is no 
alternative for learning how to use proper tools for the job, and use 
them properly. There is no easy way (meaning "press a button and 
voila!") for achieving great, or even very good, results.

As for pictures (and tables) in e-books, I agree completely, it is 
really painful experience, and diversity of readers and devices on which 
e-books are read only makes it even more painful. But there is no easy 
way to overcome this problem in general, be it by writing code, or using 
WYSIWYG or any other approach.

M.