[scribus] epub from sla? or Scribus versus Lyx

[Gregory Pittman]

On 07/25/2011 07:57 AM, Meho R. wrote:
> On 25.07.2011 01:59, Owen wrote:
>> On Wed, 22 Jun 2011 16:40:03 -0300
>> Lila Pagola<lilapagola at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I guess this is a topic very well known by everybody in this list, but
>>> I was searching at list's archives and with Google, and I can't find
>>> real answers, and that's probably I'm doing the wrong question: Is it
>>> possible to get a acceptable version in epub format, from a Scribus
>>> design, or its pdf?
>>>
>>> I have being designing books with Scribus since several years, and
>>> many people related to the projects have recommended me to use Lyx
>>> instead of Scribus, specially regarding to its capability to easily
>>> export outputs for different devices.
>>
>> I am a little late in this thread, but other than what has already been
>> said, you may wish to consider Publican (most distros have it in their
>> repositories)
>>
>> It is the Red Hat documentation vehicle, and has a bit of a steep
>> learning curve, but the documentation is good
>>
>> The main advantages of Publican is that you can create html,pdf or epub
>> and make facilities for translations. (Strangely, the pdf generation
>> failed on F15, but was ok on Ubuntu-11.04)
>>
>> I created a "test" epub just to get my head around the program. I
>> don't have an epub reader, though it "works" in Calibre. You can
>> download it fromhttp://members.pcug.org.au/~rcook/scribus/Scribus.epub
>> and feel free to use it as a framework of your own Scribus publications.
>>
>> In my view, creating epubs is hard work.
>>
>>
>> Good luck
>>
>>
>> Owen
> I disagree: once you learn and follow basic principles, creating EPUB
> can be really a trivial task – sometimes done in only couple of minutes,

This is a great distortion. I'm not going to advocate a PDF to ePub 
process, but this one you outline as simple is far from it. What it 
requires is a great deal of knowledge of making HTML, with the use of 
styles, and many other features as outlined by Mr. Henkel. This is no 
small task, and one has to be ready to do all of this manual tagging to 
make it work.

Mr. Henkel seems also to be talking about a book which is almost 
entirely text. As soon as one wants to begin adding graphics and having 
them placed in particular ways in relationship to the text, there is 
much tweaking to be done, and my experience is that the final appearance 
in some ebook reader is still a bit iffy.

The easy part here is using calibre to convert an HTML file to ePub, but 
this is easy also with the method that Owen has outlined. Once again, 
the challenge is making your text with all of the proper HTML/DocBook 
markup.

Greg