Which Single Source Publishing tools and strategies are available?

Question

I'm about to write a 1000-Pages Documentation about a huge programming framework. The goal is to bring this documentation online into an web platform, so that online users can search through it and read it online. At the same time, the text has to be made public in PDF format for download. And at the same time, the whole thing needs to go into a printed book as well (print on demand, they want a giant PDF file with the whole book).

The PDF files: The whole content is divided into several chapters. Every chapter will be available as a standalone PDF eBook. And finally, all chapters will be available in one huge printed book.

Is LaTeX capable for something like that? Can it be used for Single Source Publishing? Or would I have to take a look at other technologies like DocBook, etc.?

Answer 1

Some help documentation apps may give you what you're looking for. "Help and Manual" is an excellent program, probably best of the lot, and a great bargain. Let's you publish your documentation project in any of a number of ofrmats, including html and pdf.

See web page at: http://helpandmanual.com

Answer 2

I presume with such a big project you'll be splitting the document across several files to keep things manageable? How I would do this is have several root-level documents, for the various outputs required, consisting of not much more than the following:

\documentclass[options]{book}
\include{commonpreamble}
\begin{document}
\tableofcontents
\include{chapIntroduction}
\include{chapBasics}
\include{chapAdvancedStuff}
\end{document}

The downloadable pdfs can include a similar root-document that just includes a single chapter file, with a different \documentclass{} and options as appropriate.

As for making it html, I'd look at things like these. I've not done it myself, but it seems do-able.

Answer 3

Depending on how much/how little you want to tweak the final pdf layout asciidoc might be worth to look at.

It's input files are very human-readable text files, so you could make your document available not only as pdf or webpage, but also as plain text. It is also capable of generating xml which can be rendered with custom stylesheets to numerous output formats like epub or info files.

There are some examples on the asciidoc homepage.