Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
If I may--the reason that some of you are struggling with "how easy" it would be to single-source this (go from final "print" source to epub to mobi, etc.) is because, quite bluntly, you don't do this for a living, and thus, don't know what really happens when print is involved. This is not a criticism; it's a statement. In the print world (and we do POD PDF's), what really happens is, many of the things that get changed are only visible, and knowable, and hence fixable, when the book is put into print format. For example, if you are almost any author being legacy-published, and the print formatter ends up with a chapter with an orphaned 5 words, dangling precipitously onto an horrifyingly blank page, there's no magic stick that fixes that. At RH, they pick up the phone, call the author, and tell him/her to lose 5 words--or have the "real" editor (not typing editor) do it. Have a sentence that, heavens forfend, has a normally-hyphenated word that then hyphenates syallabically in the second word? You have the author or editor add a word or two...or take one or two out. Hyphenation takes a looong time to do--if you're going to do it correctly. Doing it crappily takes minutes. And making it look decent means a modicum of rewriting--by somebody.
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Shouldn't these edits for length then be made in the source document, and then you run the source to PDF conversion process again giving you a corrected single source document and a corrected print output PDF? Or is the source-to-PDF process so horrendously hand-cranked that you only want to do it once?
For info I am peripherally involved in single source to multiple output publishing in higher education - we go from quasi-XML to online PDF, print PDF, epub, content managed VLE sites and probably other formats that I don't know about. We've gone through (and are still going through) a lot of pain trying to morph a print-centric process into a multi-output one.
Andrew