As most of you know, I’m fascinated by publishing workflows. These days, my preferred scheme is write in Emacs/Org-mode and export to whatever final format I need. This strikes me as ideal.
Not everyone agrees, of course. Scott Chacon, one of the original GitHub developers and coauthor of Pro Git v. 2 has a different workflow. Unsurprisingly, he uses the Atom editor so he doesn’t write in Org markup. Instead, he uses Asciidoc, which is similar to Org but independent of any editor. Of course, these are just details. What makes his workflow different is how he leverages GitHub and the O’Reilly Atlas publishing toolchain.
Most of us won’t have access to Atlas but we can all use GitHub and leverage the methods that Chacon describes for collaboration and working with technical editors. I’ve written before about working as a technical editor and dealing with Word documents. I would much rather use the methods Chacon describes.
If you’re planning on writing a book—especially with one or more collaborators—be sure to check out Chacon’s post. He’s got a lot of good ideas. His workflow could easily be adjusted to work with Emacs and Org.