Book Deal Fell Apart (sigh)

After spending a couple of years (really) working with a publisher, the deal has gone south.

The problem was—likely—all mine.  The book wasn't really what the publisher wanted.  Perhaps it was close and they thought they could edit it into shape.  And perhaps I wasn't responsive enough to criticism.

I like to think that I was responsive, since I made almost all of the suggested changes.

But the deal fell apart, so my subjective impression isn't too relevant.

What To Do?

I have two essential choices here.

1. Finish up.  Simply press on with the heavily-edited version.  The path of least resistance.
2. Roll back the content.  This involves going back to a less heavily edited version and merging in the relevant changes and corrections from the writing process.

Option 2 is on the table because my editor was unhappy with "digressive" material.  The editor had a vision of some kind of narrative arc that exposed Python in one smooth story line.  My attempted presentation was to expose language features and provide supporting details.

Perhaps I'm too deeply invested in the details of computer science.   Or.  Perhaps I'm just a lousy writer.  But I felt that the digressions were of some value because they could fill in some of the gaps I observed while coaching and teaching programmers over the last few decades.

In addition to the editorial challenge, there's technical challenge.  Do I step back from LaTeX?

• Use LaTeX.  This means that I would have to create the non-PDF version with a LaTeX to HTML translator.  Read Converting LaTeX to HTML in the Modern Age.  See Pandoc.  Or, it means that I don't offer an HTML version (a disservice, I think.)  Also, I need to unwind the publisher's LaTeX style libraries and revert to a plain LaTeX.  Since LaTeX is semantically poor, I need to rework a lot of RST markup.
• Revert to RST.  While RST tools can make both LaTeX and HTML from a common source, it does mean that some of the fancier LaTeX formatting has to go.  Specifically, I really got to know the algorithm and algorithmic packages.  I hate to give those up.  But maybe I can work something out with Sphinx 1.1.3's various features.

The problem is that three of the four combinations of paths have advantages.

• Finish up using LaTeX is easiest.  Remove the publisher's document style.  Use HeVeA or Pandoc to make HTML.  Move on.  
• Finish up but revert to RST.  This means conversion from the publisher's LaTeX to RST followed by some editing to fix the missing RST semantic markup and then some debugging to get the LaTeX and HTML to look good.
• Rollback the content using LaTeX.  This would be challenging because I would have to merge manually edited publisher-specific LaTeX from the heavily-edited version with the Sphinx-generated LaTeX from the less-heavily edited source.  Things like the publishers' style tags would complicate the merge. 
• Rollback the content and revert to RST. This means using Pandoc to convert the heavily-edited LaTeX to RST. Then merging the relevant edits into the RST original text.   This actually seems pretty clean, since the heavily-edited RST (converted from LaTeX) would be short.

Perhaps, if I was a better writer, I wouldn't have these problems.

It appears than the solution is MacFarlane's Pandoc.  This can reverse LaTeX to RST, allowing easy side-by-side merging of texts from various sources.  Or.  It can convert LaTeX to HTML, allowing easy work with the heavily edited LaTeX version.