Automating the technical writing process

It pays off in the long run to write some custom code and tweak your own working environment. How many programmers spend time writing code to improve other people's productivity but don't invest the time to automate their own work flow? Probably too many.

I have been working fairly hard in my free time on two "free web books" for my main we site. In the past I have simply created PDF files and made them available for my site. Although I write my "free web books" using a Creative Commons license, I decided that I wanted to make at least a small revenue stream so that I can spend more time on these projects. My plan has been to have all of my web books readable for free online with a small Google Adsense advertisement at the beginning of each chapter and offer through lulu.com the ability to buy PDFs with no advertising for a few dollars or get a printed book for about $12.

I would prefer spending my time writing rather than preparing HTML, PDF, and printer ready PDF. I think that I now have this process automated about as fully as I can, using custom Ruby code, shell scripting, and a "do everything" Makefile. I had experimented with using OpenOffice.org and writing some utilities to modify the generated HTML. I also experimented with the very cool SiSU system.

In the end, I went back to automating my writing setup using Latex, htlatex, pdflatex, custom Ruby code and shell scripts, and the OS X Latex editor TexShop. It feels good to get things working "just right".

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