Just wondering. It’s been hard to find information about how people and companies put their textbooks together. Some years ago I came across a post on Sitepoint that explained a bit of their book-creation process. I specifically need something that can connect to a database and populate certain fields with info I can update in the database.
Yes, I know the standard recommendation of InDesign. And yes, I’ve heard of iBook, and an up-and-comer Habitat (http://www.inkling.com/habitat/).
You might get a clue what systems are being used from this: https://learnable.com/liveupdate
You can now help edit SitePoint/Learnable books on GitHub.
Watched the (short) video. Yeah, sheds a bit of light. Funny, I’ve been wondering how hard it would be to use Github for content.
I’m guessing that SitePoint has evolved to the point that they have their own parser for XML or JSON (pure speculation).
It’s been challenging to find information on how different people put their textbooks together. Most discussions tend to revolve around InDesign, but I feel that confident that some of the larger companies have their ‘roll-your-own’ systems in place.
Just gotta say that it’s been interesting to use Discourse. I feel like this topic would have languished in vBulletin, but because Discourse makes it super-easy to ping someone, you can get draw eyes to posts much more easily (obviously open to abuse as well, though).
we use various tools for the original creation of the content, markdown included, but the final generation of content into mobi/pdf/html/print format is from DocBookXML
As @santouras noted, we use Docbook XML (the writing part is normally done in markdown, but we convert to Docbook prior to editing). We have a stylesheet that outputs the content into the various formats we need.
We’ve tried a few other book creation tools (including iBooks Author and Habitat) but Docbook works well for us. For your specific use case, you may need to put something together yourself, I think.