As @jauco said try Asciidoctor - http://asciidoctor.org/

In addition to default asciidoctor style, there are other themes available - http://themes.asciidoctor.org/preview/ (See bottom right for theme switcher).

You can also take a look at Pro Git book styles - http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2 which was written in asciidoc - https://github.com/progit/progit2

Thank you so much for the pointer to the git-scm-book (in the context of asciidoc/pdf output etc). Sadly the pdf-version, isn't exactly well laid out. It suffers from similar issues that a lot of html-to-pdf-based tools (although I assume it's sgml-to-pdf in this case?) -- horrible breaks, and it also "feels" wrong wrt. some spacing/etc. Generally standard LaTeX will look (much) better than this without tweaking, IMNHO.

On the other hand, they also have an epub style sheet, and it appears (a little oddly) that the layout of the epub is better than the pdf.

FWIW most "heavily optimized" custom LaTeX styles I've come across tend to feel like being slapped in the face with MS Word -- and I think I've yet to encounter any that actually improve on the "standard" styles in any meaningful way (with possible exception of the APA style, which is ugly, but as it has to conform to APA, it's ugly by design. And looks better than most other APA conforming styles I've seen).

Still, having a starting point makes the job much easier -- so this is a great resource.

My supervisor has been writing a book (for many years now) and he has a heavily customized LaTeX style that actually works quite well for his book. He has a lot of special needs for formatting so none of the default styles really worked for him. It's actually a pretty well done dynamics textbook. I've been looking forward to the actual final published text.

You should ask him if he's considered publishing the styles under a Free/open license. Even if parts of it is very specialized, I'd surprised if it couldn't work as an interesting starting point for other projects.

Next time I talk to him, I'll see about it. I don't talk to him that often now that I've finished my PhD.

Unfortunately not, XSL isn't really my thing. I'd probably consider trying to go via LaTeX, but that's because I like the way LaTeX looks out of the box and probably isn't appropriate for most things.

Try asciidoctor and its stylesheets.