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Ask HN: Best way to organize files for a book?

8 points by bpourriahi ↗ HN
I'm sure there are some of you that have written books before. Would like the 'hacker' (if you guys still read this site) approach to maintaining the contents for a book.

I was thinking of some sort of vim extension that had a windows explorer tree on the side of the screen (for weaving through folders/text files).

7 comments

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pierrefar
For my thesis, each chapter was a separate LaTeX file, with one master index file that pulled it all together. I didn't use version control then and in retrospect, perhaps I should have.

One thing I did that saved my a: daily backups. My hard disk actually died 3 days before my deadline. These days I would also use Dropbox.

shogunmike
I had a similar setup to pierrefar, with each chapter a separate LaTeX file. However the whole project was in a Subversion repository. All of my papers, figures and other binaries were included in there too.

I'm not going to pretend I know much about the implications of storing huge binary files in SVN, but at least they were in VC.

The main benefit to me of this was not backup (although that was highly useful!) but in the fact that I could write it up in the Uni office, at home or on my laptop on holiday. Just don't forget to SVN commit every now and then :-)

mark_l_watson
For my current writing project, I have two editions (one for JVM languages and one for Common Lisp) so I have three directory structures: common material for both editions, JVM, and Lisp.

For each of these structures, I use:

/ - top level have Latex files

/images - OmniGraffle figure files and exported vector PDFs

/code - code snippets that are automatically included and formatted using Latex commands

growt
if you're going vim try these plugins:

NERD_tree

minibufexplorer

command-t

good choices not only for books but also for coding.

kroger
It depends of the kind of book you are writing and what the final file format is. In the past I'd use LaTeX unconditionally, but I've been thinking about using Sphinx[1].

[1] http://sphinx.pocoo.org/

The two main approaches are to have the whole book in one big file or one chapter per file. I think that having one chapter per file is more flexible and that's the way I'd do today.

Another thing to keep in mind is if your book is going to have source code. Is it going to be highlighted? If so, in color or grayscale? Do you want to have a way to test automatically every code snippet so you don't ship the book with broken code examples?

Also, do you have images that need to be converted, say from inkscape to png or eps? Usually I use a makefile for things like that.

[dead] RACNicole
I took advantage of the outline view in Microsoft's Word. This might be helpful in that it works just like trees work and clicking a branch opens up its corresponding chapter.