Hello.

My question is not strictly Prince-related, but I suppose some of you had to solve similar problems.

I'm currently playing around with the Prince demo, and I really like the results I get. So far, I have mainly tried to turn long, well-formatted HTML pages with a few images into PDF booklets, and the results are great.

Another thing I'd like to do is a more design-oriented stuff: Several images and text boxes with a mix of font types and sizes placed on one page (think ads or brochures), next page with a different layout. This is something I'd usually do in Adobe InDesign.

Personally, I do know how to achieve the results I want with HTML & CSS typed straight into BBEdit. However, this is... counter-intuitive and slow, to say the least. Create content in DIVs, type positioning and width values into the CSS file, render, edit, repeat...

It would be nice to just have an editor where you draw a few boxes on a page (with a “magnetic” grid and a ruler that can be set to inches or mm), adjust DIV positions and sizes with the mouse, drop some content in there... And have Prince render the results from the HTML/CSS this editor writes as a PDF. But of course, all WYSIWYG HTML editors out there have been developed for web content/browsers; they know nothing about mm-based page boundaries.

So: Can anyone here recommend a visual editor to build fairly complex, page-based layouts that will create "Prince-friendly" (i.e., clean, easy to edit, standards-compliant) HTML5 and CSS? Some post-editing wouldn't be a problem, as long as the basic code is clean and comprehensible.

If this is easy to use, I might be able to justify getting a full Prince _Server_ license instead of just a $500 Professional license, so several people in my team can create “HTML first” content. We could get rid of InDesign for brochures etc. and create web-friendly content at the same time.

I'm open both to open source and commercial software (preferably for less than $500/seat). OS X and web-based preferred, but Windows might work as well.

Thanks a lot!

That would be very cool. But I'm not sure if such a tool exists yet, and CSS has always been content-driven, not layout-driven, although recent proposals are starting to change that (grid-based layout, regions, etc.)

What about using SVG, would that help at all?

Infogrid Pacific's Digital Publisher is slowly moving in that direction, with things like "CSS Direct Design."

http://www.infogridpacific.com/blog/igp-blog-20131102-announcing-css-direct-design.html

That doesn't sound quite what you're looking for, but you may find it interesting. We use it to produce trade books.

Dave

Thanks! I'll take a look at Digital Publisher. Flux (a very visual HTML + CSS editor for OS X) also looks quite promising.

Frankly, I had expected there'd be many more products in these categories, but most still seem to rely on old-school coding.

I think this thread is very useful ! Appreciate creating .
We use TinyMCE Editor . Its not bad , you can create lot many plugins .

I am looking at Redactor:
http://imperavi.com/redactor/

Especially nice with the visual structure mode set to true:
http://imperavi.com/redactor/examples/wym/

After including the css of the project/book things should be WYSIWYG. A lot of configuration options like customized buttons and denied-html5-Tags in case you don't want users to insert specific elements.

The editor has great copy-paste from word functionality, stripping out invalid formatting. This is important if authors come/start with existing word manuscripts.

Edited 19 Jan 2014 by thomasdumm