[flying-sheep]

markdown is perfect for forum comments, but idiotic to extend too far. if you’re a programmer wanting to write a book in markdown, you’ll find yourself thinking of markdown syntax extensions more than thinking about the book.

if you want extensibility and still a rather lightweight syntax, try restructuredtext. it has exactly one flaw compared to markdown, which is the hideous inline link syntax (which practically forces you to use named links). that makes it less suited for forum comments (where you might want to quickly inline 1-2 links), but perfect for books (where you can neatly specify your link targets below the current section)

[markdennehy]

Or you could just use LaTeX, which has been used for writing books for decades (the word you're looking for is "debugged" and the phrase is either "well understood" or "well documented").

And yes, there are efforts underway to improve it (LaTeX3) but 2e works so well, there's not been much drive there.

And if you find LaTeX is so hard, there's always LyX...

[coldtea]

>which has been used for writing books for decades

Well, mostly math and science books. Very few (if any) fancy and well typespeced books by major publishers have been made with LaTeX. I know, because I know that industry. So, while TeX was once created to be a general typesetting solution, it has been relegated to something math and cs geeks use for their papers.

>And if you find LaTeX is so hard, there's always LyX...

A not really maintained, relic of a program, that tries too hard to work around the issues raised by a backend like LaTeX that wasn't really created with such GUI control in mind.

[rwl]

>Very few (if any) fancy and well typespeced books by major publishers have been made with LaTeX. I know, because I know that industry.

What do they use, then? (I'm actually pretty curious, because I am writing a dissertation that I currently build with LaTeX, but I find it much nicer to write in Org mode. I'm doing whatever I can to avoid a hard dependency on LaTeX for the backend, and to allow exporting to multiple formats.)

Why do they use whatever typesetting solution(s) they use? Does it actually produce better/nicer output than LaTeX (for non-math text)? Does it just have nicer syntax or friendlier error messages? What's the advantage?

[Mchl]

Quark Xpress and Adobe inDesign are two I have seen being used. In the past Corel Ventura was wuite popular too.

[jhasse]

> A not really maintained, relic of a program, [...]

http://www.lyx.org/trac/timeline

[rat87]

Also http://www.ohloh.net/p/lyx

[Crito]

I have to wonder if your average publisher would even know what to do with a book written in LaTeX.

[oatmeal_coffee]

Any publisher that produces books with heavy math will know what to do with LaTeX, and if not then call a vendor that will know what to do with LaTeX.