Open Source Tools for Text Processing

Abstract

This book contains study material for the course Open source word processing tools intended for education at the university level. It is the result of a project dealing with the application of open source tools in teaching. It shows that even for demanding publications there is no need to use expensive licensed software, and it is even possible to efficiently create documents that are difficult to implement in other environments or with a high proportion of manual work. The text emphasizes an efficient approach to document processing – the wide use of so-called structural (semantic) markup that allow separating the document from its visual form, thus achieving greater flexibility and reusability of the processed material. The technological tool is the Open Source system XƎLATEX widely used in the scientific and professional field, in education and in selected publishing houses. It is a principle whose mastery brings significant advantages to users when processing professional texts, such as various seminar and final theses, articles, proceedings and other publications. Together with the individual elements of the XƎLATEX system, the book also contains an explanation of the necessary typographical principles and rules applied in common types of documents. It thus brings a complete view of document processing.