ENTRIES TAGGED "authoring tools"

New on O'Reilly Labs: Open Feedback Publishing System

O'Reilly engineer Keith Fahlgren has formally launched our new Open Feedback Publishing System over on O'Reilly Labs: Over the last few years, traditional publishing has been moving closer to the web and learning a lot of lessons from blogs and wikis, in particular. Today we're happy to announce another small step in that direction: our first manuscript (Programming Scala) is…

Authoring Tools from Alpha Geeks

Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) has posted a nice article covering some of the tools he's built or borrowed to make his writing life more manageable. I'm especially intrigued by the Flashbake project, which augments simple use of version control (something many of our authors have been using for years, and which we use extensively in our production toolchain) to automatically capture…

Webcast Video: Essential Tools of an XML Workflow

Below you'll find the full recording from the TOC webcast, "Essential Tools of an XML Workflow," with Laura Dawson….

Presentations from the StartWithXML Forum

The following slides accompanied many of the presentations during the StartWithXML forum, held Jan. 13, 2009 in New York City. XML–Why Bother? David Young, Hachette Book Group USA As Chairman and CEO of one of America's leading trade publishers, David Young presents the executive perspective on the role of XML technologies in the increasingly complex business of creating and selling…

BeyondPrint Offers Helpful Review of StartWithXML

A review of the StartWithXML forum and research paper supports the effort but questions why we are silent on the quality of XML tools.

News Roundup: Kindle 2.0 Speculation, Wikipedia: The Book, "Dilbert" Embraces User-Generated Content, Mobile Audiobook Downloads, Tracking Drafts and Revisions

Speculation on Kindle 2.0 Ars Technica speculates on what the Kindle 2.0 might provide: … the general hardware configuration appears to be here for a while. The fact that they're still selling the current version also suggests that they have committed to this design in all its white-plastic glory. In the long term, there's still the option of moving some…

Writing and Tracking through Subversion

Programmers use version control systems to track and monitor code revisions. Writers can bring the same functionality to their drafts by following Rachel Greenham's Mac OS X Subversion tutorial: What does it [Subversion] do? It manages multiple versions of a project in development. You check your project out of the repository, make changes and you commit those changes back to…

Google Docs Soon to Sport Offline Editing

While a few brave souls are already using Google Docs for long-form writing (eg, books), one of the most glaring shortcomings for the platform — that you have to be online to use it — is now changing. Over the coming weeks, Google is rolling out offline editing, with some important caveats (via Webware): Google Docs will not, at…

Haskell Book Author Adapts to Reader Comments While Writing

Yesterday's post about writing a book with Google Docs was about improving collaboration among authors (as well as working without the cruft of word-processing features that aren't germane to many manuscripts). But writing on the Web also means you can collaborate with your readers, long before anything is ready for print. Bryan O'Sullivan recently posted his thoughts on the feedback…

Writing a Book with Google Docs

As you might imagine, a lot of the O'Reilly authors are a bit more technically savvy than most, which means they're often willing to help us experiment with new authoring, editing, and sometimes publishing models (indeed, they're often the ones who suggest the experiments). Phillip Lenssen has a terrifically thorough post on his experiences using Google Docs to write the…