Generate HTML and PDF

Question

Hello.

I'm thinking of the way I'd generate a university newspaper both in PDF and HTML (a website) where every news would contain picture(s) and wonder if there any tools to approach this problem declaratively so that unexperienced users would prepare structured data (text + pictures) and get PDF and website on output on their own with no programmers' intervention. I suspect it can be some sort of XSL-FO, XML editing/processing software.

P. S. A free tool(s) would be a best solution.

Thank you.

Answer 1

we (swansea University) used a content management system to achive this - DotNetNuke in our instance.

We wanted multipage newletter where a summary on the newletter and click more for the fuller article. The content management system allowed normal users to use the software to construct the newletter, they simple created a new child site every month.

We had the newletter emailed out, we we simply grabbed the html from the main page and sent to a distribution list.

Something worth considering - cost = £0

Answer 2

The obvious way of doing it would be to generate all your content in XML, then use either a commercial XSL-FO processor for PDF, or apache FOP to generate the PDF, and whatever your XSL processor is to generate the html.

Answer 3

Very similar to Simon Thompson's answer:

You can use Drupal and its print module.

Answer 4

For this, a very good approach would be to use DocBook to write your articles, than let the tools generate HTML and PDFs you need - with just some tuning of the look and feel output from your side.

For DocBook there are many available tools, but a very good one that is free for open source and academics is XMLMind

If your articles are more technical oriented, than DocBook is the quasi-standard (even many publishing houses like O'Reilly use it)

Of course, in the "pure" academics domain, LaTex is quite the standard (and allows to have output in allot of formats), but requires quite allot to learn it, and there are no true WYSIWYG tools to write the articles. If you intend to send the articles to some research papers too, than they are very glad to accept your LaTex input.