I wrote a perl book using pod (the perl doc format). The process was baroque: pod to latex,latex to rtf. Which then gave me an msword interchange format - impor

I wrote a perl book using pod (the perl doc format). The process was baroque: pod to latex,latex to rtf. Which then gave me an msword interchange format - important for the publisher. I also wrote a PhD thesis. I started with various msword compatible formats (for process reasons). I curated the documents into markdown and was hoping to use markdown/citeproc to produce a thesis via either msword or latex. However that was going to be a pain in the bum, so I finished it up with latex/hyperref/bibtex. So, tl;dr I think if your book is not citation or maths heavy and you are in control of the process I would recommend markdown to latex via pandoc. If it’s citation heavy,then I’d probably recommend cutting out the pandoc middleman and going straight to latex/bibtex. If it’s maths heavy then markdown to latex might work. If it’s someone else’s process, I recommend jury rigging something that will get them an MVP.