If possible, we should choose a solution that is free/libre open source
software and runs on all three major platforms, so that any and all
volunteers who wish to do this can use the same tool, without expense.
+1
Of course, if that ideal is not a choice, then other solutions must be
considered.
We do indeed have some non-free software in our tooling (e.g. Visual
Studio for Windows builds), but I agree that we should seek to avoid
or minimize it as much as we can, especially when the output files are
intended for all platforms.
The other consideration is that the tool should be easy to use and require
minimal (preferably no) manual intervention to prepare for the
conversion* or clean up the results. This is for purely practical reasons:
if much work is involved, it won't get done regularly for updated
books, after the first flush of enthusiasm wears off.
I wholly agree here -- ideally we'd have a one-click script that would
take as an argument one or more ODT files and produce PDFs and EPUBs
out the other side.
* Other than moving the source files (ODT) out of our current template
and into a suitable template and using those new source files for
generating PDF, ePub, whatever. That's a big job but should only need to be
done once.
True. To be efficient, we should figure out our workflow before we
spend a lot of time modifying each source file.
Given that we author the manuals in LibreOffice and use the same to
generate PDFs, it would be easiest for initial set-up and maintenance
to use the same tool to generate EPUBs. I'll chat with both the author
of eLAIX and the Document Liberation team and see if either of them is
interested in helping build/improve EPUB export specifically for our
manuals.
Best,
--R