Posts

Showing posts from September, 2011

Using AsciiDoc for Mathematical Publications

Technical writing is an integral part of my research in computer science and operations research. I have a long history using LaTeX, which is very well suited for writing technical articles that contain mathematical equations as well as code snippets. Although LaTeX can readily generate postscript and PDF output files, I have been unimpressed with tools that generate HTML from LaTeX source. Thus, I was intrigued by AsciiDoc , which promises to generate PDF, HTML and eBook formats. AsciiDoc is used to provide online documentation for software projects, and authors can publish book through O'Rielly using this tool. Thus, this is a well-developed document generation tool. I have successfully prototyped a draft book, Getting Started with Coopr , and you can browse the subversion repository for this document here . Note that the Makefile file specifies build targets for PDF, HTML and eBook files. The advantage of AsciiDoc is that you can use a simple markup language to generate