Workbook User Guide

Introduction

Summary

Welcome. Workbook is a software that helps you write, edit, and publish quality books easy.

Technically, it is a converter that converts XHTML-based manuscript to PDF. You can get real-time preview of your manuscript using web browser, and complete preview of print output on-the-fly using PDF viewer.

Fast feedback leads to better quality of the content. With workbook, you can iterate write-preview-edit cycle as much as, as fast as you like, unlike traditional book authoring process. Workbook thus helps authors develop quality books.

In this document, we will describe how to use the software.

Objective

Workbook's objective is simple: Help people make good books easy.

We love books. We want to make quality books easy.

Good books are:

• Easy to read
• Easy to understand

So we need:

• High quality typesetting
• Aid for extensive iterative elaboration (rewriting)

But existing tools do not meet our needs, though they work great for their purposes.

• Interactive DTP software are easy to use, but require human operators, thus consume time and money for each change.
• LaTeX or XML are batch-processable, but difficult to learn.

Workbook tries to solve this by:

• Easy to use, open interface (XHTML).
• Automatic on-the-fly typesetting with batch-processing backend (LaTeX, XML, etc.)

Workbook provides quality typesetting and ease of iterative elaboration by cherrypicking features from existing tools.

(Note that collaboration and other important things in creative process are not in its scope. They are achieved by other tools such as concurrent version control systems.)

Philosophy

Our principles are:

• Help humans concentrate on creative things. Let machines do routine things.
• More freedom and less cost.

Hence we consider the following as important.

• Open data, open code.
  • We can do whatever we want. Easy to use with other tools.
• Follow conventions. Use common interfaces.
  • Reduce learning/development/maintainance cost.
• Do not write code or invent rules unless really necessary.
  • Use existing tools. (= less work, less bugs)
  • Follow standards. (= better compatibility and portability)
  • Fight features. (= less burdon and more manageability)
• Avoid dependency. Keep modularity.
  • Adaptable to future changes.

License

Copyright (c) 2005-2006, Project Workbook. All rights reserved.

Workbook is free software. See LICENSE for detail.

Acknowledgments

This software was being developed with grant from IPA ESP program, under the supervision by Professor Yoshiaki Mima (2006-Q3..2007-Q1, 2007-Q3..2008-Q1, see http://www.ipa.go.jp/jinzai/esp/). We appreciate those who helped us develop this software.