Troubleshooters.Com ® and The Stylz ProjectPresent:
Other Writing Tools
Copyright © 2015 by Steve Litt
Should I use Stylz to write a book that needs to be exported to both PDF (or paper) and ePub?
Yes. This is exactly what Stylz is optimized to do.
Should I use Stylz to write an artistic or "coffee table" book?
No, Stylz doesn't allow page by page, line by line, or one-off spacing tweaks. Use a desktop publisher to do artistic or coffee table books.
Should I use Stylz to write a book I know for a fact will never be exported to anything but PDF (or paper)?
No, LyX is a better choice if you know for a fact that your book will never be exported to anything but PDF. Be careful, however, because "never" is a long, long time, and LyX ePub exports lose and garble styles.
Should I use Stylz for a book that absolutely must contain tables?
Not as of Stylz version 1: No tables yet. Be careful, however, because tables read on a small device are usually a disaster.
Should I use Stylz for a book with a bibliography?
Maybe. You'll need to do a lot of the work yourself, using other tools. If you need to export to both PDF and ePub, and need both to be high quality exports, it's a lot less work to manually assemble your bibliography than to export something like LyX to a quality ePub.
Should I use Stylz to write letters?
No, use LibreOffice for that.
Should I use Stylz to make garage sale flyers?
No, use Inkscape for that.
Should I use Stylz to make a presentation?
No, use Powerpoint, LibreOffice Presenter, or LaTeX/Beamer for that.
Should I use Stylz for general purpose writing?
No, use LibreOffice for that.
Why not use LibreOffice, OpenOffice, or MS Word and convert to ePub?
Those wordprocessors tend to dump your styles and replace them for appearances, so you have very little control over your finished ePub. This also makes documents much bigger, and violates the specifications of most of the eBook vendors. Also, exporting from a wordprocessor will almost certainly create readability problems in the finished ePub.
Why not use LyX and export to ePub?
This is certainly a better alternative than exporting from a wordprocessor, and in fact I wrote a program to de-scramble LyX exported HTML, to the extent that with not too much user intervention, I could make it an ePub with my choice of appearances mapped to the styles. But without my program, which was *very* complicated, it would have taken a lot of human intervention in Sigil.
Why not convert from a PDF?
This will almost certainly not only drop all styles, but will most likely insert numerous reader-disturbing artifacts into the finished ePub.
Why not have a service do the ePub conversion for me?
First, almost all services require you to input either an MSWord or PDF. PDFs always produce horrible ePubs. I've heard that some conversion vendors can make high quality ePubs from an MSWord. Either way, if you go this route, understand that every time you have a small revision, you pay another $100 and wait another week for the revised ePub. The intent of Stylz is to convert the revised source document to each output format, yourself, in one minute.
Why not use markdown, asciidoc, Mediawiki, or other wikilanguage, and export?
These make it hard to make your own styles. If you're writing a very simple fiction book, these might do the job. Otherwise, Stylz is your friend. If anyone can show me a manuscript, containing arbitrary self-made character and paragraph styles, I'll change my mind. Otherwise, no.
Why not use docbook?
Docbook will certainly do the job. That being said, with all its start and end tags, Docbook's authoring isn't as quick, and it's more error prone than Stylz.
Why not use XXE or Jutoh?
These are mature commercial software. I can't say for sure how they'll work for you, because I wasn't willing to buy them to find out. I tried XXE's free demo, and it worked well, but the learning curve is much steeper than that of Stylz. Of course, Stylz' exporters are not yet written, so if you need it right now, these might be worth investigation.
The bottom line is that Stylz has been crafted and optimized from the ground up to quickly write long documents, such as books, using nothing but text and style names, and then using export mechanisms to turn the Stylz document into high quality ePub, high quality PDF (proably via LaTeX), high quality HTML, and any other format for which somebody writes an exporter. It wouldn't be all that hard to write a Stylz to LibreOffice, or even a Stylz to MSWord converter.
Stylz prioritizes simplicity, authoring speed, and universal exportability above features, including tables and math equations. But most of these features aren't appropriate for flowing text on small devices anyway. Also hugely depriorized in Stylz is the ability to hand-tweak page and line breaks, spacing on specific passages, and directly applying appearances to specific text, without using styles.