[voidUpdate]

> "I would love if the XHTML and TeX were artifacts rather than code"

What's an "artifact"? I don't come from a writing background, so it may be obvious to some people, but I only know that word in a historical-ish context, as something old and important, which doesn't seem to make sense in this context

[theknarf]

An artifact is the output of an automated process that take some input and outputs artifacts. Its a generic term that can mean all kinds of things depending on the process and type of output. For example if you have a program that take an Open Office document in and produce a pdf and an epub file out then "pdf" and "ebup" would be the artifacts.

[donalhunt]

In software development, an artifact is a deployable file produced during the build process, such as a .jar, .zip, .exe, or Docker image.

In the publishing world, an artifact is something that is a product of processing code. e.g. the OP wants their code to generate files in various formats.

[Rp8yXmdmr]

Artifact in this context is whatever is produced by build process. That is common convention in CI/CD context. And the base definition for "artifact" is very wide: anything artificial, as in not natural but made by humans.

[voidUpdate]

Aren't the xhtml and TeX already artifacts though? They are produced from a script that parses the ODT

[dustin1114]

There is a bit of manual tweaking required in LaTeX that I haven't figured out how to automate yet. It's mainly related to chapter endings: if there are only 2 or 3 lines on the last page, I can subtly tighten the tracking from a paragraph on the second to last page and eliminate an almost-empty page. Also, I have PNG maps that currently need some one-off LaTeX directives to lay them out how I want. I could probably embed some properties in the ODT image, but that seems kind of janky. If I needed to regenerate from the ODT source, I use a Git three-way merge to update it (also janky, but it's expedient).