In the last couple of days, I was working on a slightly different format of Balance. I was taking fightertype's suggestion of just making it a book instead of the three-ring binder that I happen to like. The reasons are varied, but it might be drifting a little too far from the "normal" to be anything other than "cool." Not to mention, I could actually publish it on lulu.com instead of jumping through hoops myself.

So, I used my MfGames.OpenDocument library to createa concatanate and combine function, really smoothed out the command-style replacement feature, which I think is so neat, and built it all into a nice workflow. It takes each of the individual files, expands out the command styles to insert the metrics (and later characters and actions). Then it combines all of them in one directory with a part title (complete with title sheet). And finally, it throws all of them together into a single ODT file.

At the moment, there are a couple of "bummers." One is that the MfGames.OpenDocument doesn't quite handle indexes and tables yet. Once it does, I can automatically build up the table of contents and the indexes as part of the workflow.

I also couldn't get the OOo templates to work, so I went with my class "restyle" Makefile rule. This just unzips a template file, grabs the style, and replaces all the other ODT's style.xml file with that one. Fast and simple and works every single time.