Comment by kstenerud
8 years ago
I also created a typesetting program to produce a book I was writing, because I was impressed with what was available. I wanted to push a button, and have it compile a PDF for printing, an EPUB for tablets and phones, a text version for proofreading, and an html version for debugging. Shockingly, nobody had done this.
Each publishing house and newspaper has a home-grown pipeline to do something close to this.
With work, you can get something that does most of what you want with a few stacks. You can cobble it together for markdown. Alternatively, there are strong plugins to emacs org mode that can go to TeX, then postscript, then PDF. There is probably a stack centred around docbook as well.
My experience has been that if you care about details, you will need to write parts yourself, as you have done. Emacs org mode is a good starting point. You can create your foundation data structures in org-mode trees, and then transform out to the main render pipelines (TeX, etc).
Sphinx can do that, using reStructuredText as its input language. In lieu of a button, run this:
That sounds remarkably like Pandoc. Have you tried it?
Care to share?