PUBLISHING

Pandoc
Pandoc is the ‘Swiss-army knife’ of text converters, an Open Source software
application able to convert between a wide variety of document formats. In our
projects, Pandoc has been the essential tool for converting documents written
in Microsoft Word to Markdown, and then later for converting edited Markdown
source documents to EPUB. Pandoc only has a command-line interface and can be
run in the Mac OS X Terminal, the Windows Command Prompt and the Linux Terminal.
The program has an enormous amount of features such as user-defined design
templates and metadata management. It can be used for all kinds of purposes
and can be highly customized for one’s particular document creation needs. Our
Hybrid Workflow How-To Guides (for editors, designers, and developers include
various real-world examples for using Pandoc.
http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
PHPePub
For Valiz Publishers, an online EPUB generator was developed based on CakePHP
and a set of Open Source software modules, notably Asbjørn Grandt’s PHPePub. 2
The project was developed with relatively low-cost and low-feature 3 web hosting
in mind. Notable features include support for endnotes and a WYSIWYG editor
based on HTML5’s ‘content-editable’ mechanism. The platform allows publishers
to author and generate EPUBs suitable for distribution in various bookstores.
https://github.com/Grandt/PHPePub
PHP
PHP is a programming language typically coupled with a web server and used for
creating dynamic websites.
http://php.net
Python
Python is a general-purpose programming (or scripting) language. In one of our
projects, Python was used to make small ‘helper’ programs to clean up HTML,
to extract and accumulate metadata from different files, and to create animated
GIF book trailers from EPUB files. Python scripts often make use of additional
program modules known as libraries. For our project, we made use of the html-
5lib and images2gif libraries. Python is Free Software / Open Source and comes
pre-installed on Mac OS X and all standard flavors of Linux. For all other operating
systems, an installer can be downloaded from the Python website.
http://www.python.org/
2 Asbjørn Grandt's PHPePub, https://github.com/Grandt/PHPePub.
3 E.g. no command-line access, limited possibilities for executing external programs like Pandoc.
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