[TOS] Teaching materials, or textbook?

[Jared Smith]

On Thu, 2009-05-14 at 07:18 +0100, Ross Gardler wrote:
> On the other hand I do like the cnx.org approach, Greg
> should keep it in mind when discussing with O'Reilly.

One of the problems here is that O'Reilly is going to want the book
formatted in either DocBook or (heaven forbid!) Microsoft Word (with
their fancy macros that make it very DocBook-like).  I spent quite a bit
of time looking at CNX, and while I like the idea of it being all
web-based, it doesn't give us an easy way to export to DocBook if we (or
O'Reilly) decide that it's important.

I'm not sure doing a XSL transform from the CNXML to/from DocBook would
be worth the time and effort, but it *is* another possibility.

One other concern about CNX is that I don't find a lot of options with
regards to customizing the output... one my the reasons I like DocBook
so much is that I have an incredible amount of control of the look and
feel of the finished product (whether it be a PDF or an HTML page or a
collection of HTML pages) by adjusting the XSL stylesheets.  I don't see
that CNX gives you *any* control over paper sizes, fonts, etc. 

On a related topic, there is a Google Summer of Code project to build a
web-based DocBook editor plugin for Beacon
(http://www.kix.in/projects/beacon/) but I doubt it'll be done in time
to really be feasible at this time.

-Jared