Just a thought. I’m getting very close to publishing my next book (more here, and on Facebook) and am playing with various potential workflows for ebook and print-on-demand file handling/creation. One interesting service I’ve encountered is Pressbooks, which they describe as:
It looks very much like a sort of “compile” on the web, but with more control on epub/PDF styling etc. I wondered if there might be a neat way of getting Scrivener to work with Pressbooks - perhaps by having a “compile to” option in Scriv, matched by an “import from” in Pressbooks. Thoughts?
The trouble is that there is an abundance of publishing tools appearing on the web, and it would be impossible to support every one of them. Surely Pressbooks have some import options, though? I would have thought that they would take the book in a common format such as RTF or .doc. Unfortunately, I can’t find much information on their site, but presumably you have looked into this - what imports formats to they support?
All I can see is importers from blog formats - Wordpress, Tumbler, and Blogspot. But as it’s built on Wordpress, you can cut and paste rtf, plain text, HTML, .doc etc. But the system is in active development, and they are promising interesting things - like export to InDesign.
That said, I quite appreciate that this a very active field at the moment, and it must be difficult to know who are the real players. Still, as Scrivener is now something of a heavyweight in its field, Pressbooks might jump at the chance of working with you!
If you’re active on their forums, maybe you could suggest they support Multi-Markdown as an import option. It’s an option where underline and bold as well as [][footnotes] and other things are formatted using standard Ascii characters. Scrivener allows you to write that way, then throw that output through the an included script that interprets these simple marks for a few destination document types.
One can also compile from Scrivener to multimarkdown format, for use with other tools… such as Pressbooks.
Thanks Robert. Yes, Markdown to XML might be the way to go. But I’m no evangelist for Pressbooks – I just found their site when researching publication workflows and thought it an interesting idea. I particularly like the idea that a work is held in a simple format which can then be formatted and output in a number of different ways - like compile on steroids, as it were.