1. Preface
  2. Visual Editors VS Markup
  3. The Txt2tags Approach
  4. Fast and Furious
  5. Organize the Sources in Folders
  6. Version Control Made Easy
  7. Quality Matters
  8. Other Advantages
  9. No Tool Fits All Needs
This document is a quick guide showing the benefits of using the txt2tags tool on the book writing process. Also applicable for other large documents as Guides and Thesis.

1. Preface

I'm the txt2tags[1] author and I wrote two published papers using it: a Regular Expressions book (96 pages) and a Shell Programming Course (108 pages). The writing process was smooth and painless, so I want to share this experience.

A book is a real big work to get done, but it doesn't have to be a complicated process. To write is to organize ideas into text structures like sections, paragraphs and lists. Txt2tags is a tool that makes this task simple and easy.

Writing alone or in a team, with or without version control, technical contents or not, text-only or graphics-enabled. In any case txt2tags can be used as the main tool for the book creation.

There is a book being written right now, using txt2tags.

[1] Txt2tags reads a text file with minimal markup as **bold** and //italic// and converts it to documents like HTML, LaTeX and Adobe PageMaker. More info: http://txt2tags.org.

2. Visual Editors VS Markup

The two common ways of writing a book are to use a Visual Editor (Microsoft Word, Adobe Pagemaker) or a Markup Language (LaTeX, docbook).

In Visual Editors you write and format the contents at the same time. This approach is nice for small texts, but for a 300 pages book, the formatting consume time and distract the writer.

In Markup Languages you write contents and mark it up, so an external program will convert it to the final form. The writer don't mind about formatting, but the process of including <tags></tags> and \more{tags} is error prone and very intrusive, making the contents hard to read on the sources.

Txt2tags also uses the markup schema, but the big difference is that its marks are very minimal, some indeed are almost natural, as using the hyphen for list items. So the writer can focus on contents only and the source remains readable.

3. The Txt2tags Approach

Using txt2tags, the book writing process follow these steps:

  1. The author(s) learn the very simple txt2tags markup rules.

  2. The author writes the book contents, forgetting about noises like page margin, font face, colors and sizes.

  3. The author (or the publisher) open the contents on a graphical text processor that reads HTML (or LaTeX or ...) and conclude the book formatting.

Step 1 is fast, just a few minutes. Step 2 will take months, and step 3 can take days or weeks.

Writing contents is when you will spend more time on the book, so it is really important to make this process a simple, productive and pleasant task.

The following are arguments showing that txt2tags can be used to achieve that.

4. Fast and Furious

Time is the key. Using txt2tags you will experience a very high productivity period because you write contents, not formatting.

5. Organize the Sources in Folders

Txt2tags has a built in command to include external files in any part of a document, at conversion time. It makes possible to split the sources into several files.

6. Version Control Made Easy

Txt2tags helps the book version control with line based tools (as CVS and Subversion). The sources are plain text, not compiled data.

7. Quality Matters

You can write a book. Or you can write THE book. Txt2tags has nice built in features to increase your work quality.

8. Other Advantages

And there is more!

9. No Tool Fits All Needs

There are some special cases where txt2tags is not a good tool for writing books.


Writing Books with Txt2tags - Oct/2004 (see source)