Scott P ✅Hey .. genealogists and historians! Do you create print books of your research .. either for friends/family or possibly larger distribution? I'm curious what tools you use. I've been in tech publishing for 30+ years, and the few books I've published, I used Adobe FrameMaker. It is really the best "old-school" tool for making "real" books (frontmatter, toc, lists, index, footnotes, etc). I'm working on a new (mostly free) workflow. (cont)
... this workflow uses DITA XML as the source and the DITA-OT for PDF publishing (or EPUB, HTML, etc). It's definitely on the geeky side, but really works quite well. I'm working on a plugin for the OT that supports genealogically oriented formatting and features, and I'm hoping to find a few people who might be interested in test driving things to offer suggestions for other useful features.
The catch is that I'd encourage you to use Oxygen XML Editor for authoring. (cont)
... But, Oxygen does cost money (they have an "educational" license and a 30-day free trial that can often be extended).
I'm working on #WikiTree and #GEDCOM to DITA converters. These can help getting the bulk of the content into DITA. I'll soon put together a video that demos these tools so you can get an overview of the process.
I'm hoping to repurpose my technical publishing expertise to something more meaningful than "tech" publishing.
Todd Wells@saprentice This sounds interesting, I’ve been dabbling in tech related to genealogy, too. I’m not really near the publishing stage yet, but have been doing some LaTeX workflows to generate some preliminary docs (family summaries and research progress reports). I should really try to write that up at https://pedigreepipeline.com.
That looks like a very useful pipeline! I’ve considered doing something similar with SVG, but haven’t gotten around to trying it.
I really should play with LaTeX at some point. I’ve been in the XML publishing world for so long, I haven’t explored other options. I do love the flexibility in output options from XML.
I’ll ping you when I have something to show for this project. It’s getting close.