Book layout

[Wander Boessenkool]

On Fri, 2004-12-24 at 00:57 +0100, Lehofer, Meinhard wrote:
> Søren Hauberg schrieb:
> 
> > Hi Everybody
> > I recently converted my father to linux.
> > My father is an architect and is about to write a book about his 
> > research. This being a book on architecture means there will be a lot 
> > of photographies and not that much text.

Time to teach your father how to use the Gimp for the retouching

> >
> > Now my question is what kind of software should I recommend him? 
> > OpenOffice.org/AbiWord seems to be more concerned with the text than 
> > the layout so I don't think that's a very good choice.
> >
> > I know I'm being very precise here, but that's because I don't really 
> > know what I'm looking for.
> >
> > Thanks (and a merry Christmas to those of you that celebrate Christmas)
> > /Søren
> >
> Try Scribus, it's a Desktop Publishing Programme (DTP) like Quark Xpress 
> or Adobe Indesign. It is included in the Ubuntu repositories (Universe, 
> i think). The developer team was talking about releasing a new version 
> this year (1.21).

First off: Scribus would indeed be a good choice, but if your father
(who I guess is somewhat technical) doesn't mind learning some new
tricks you might also look in to LaTeX. There are some graphical
frontends to it, although none spring to mind right now (I edit using
vi).

LaTeX is based around the principle that you know about good content,
LaTeX knows about good layout (once someone has teached it about it). It
has some basic styles that look really professional, but your father
would probably have to create his own one (which requires learning,
understanding and then some more learning, but who knows: maybe your
father will enjoy the challenge) to get a nice style for a book with a
lot of pictures. (TeX/LaTeX was designed for technical documents)

It has been used for many years to markup technical, and
not-so-technical, documents, and aso has a broad userbase, most of whom
are also friendly.

Scribus on the other hand, as you would expect from a DTP-package,
doesn't care (much) about the content. It focuses on the layout of the
content, and how to let the user specify it using a nice GUI.

So my conclusion: google around for abit for some nice examples to show
your dad, explain to him the difference in the general approach and let
him toy around for a bit with both.

Both applications have a learning-curve, although the curve for LaTex
(and TeX and TeTeX) is a bit steeper. But as with any good tool, the
steep learning curve starts paying really soon ;-)


BTW: the LaTeX homepage is at http://www.latex-project.org/ , googling
for latex will give you some (un)expected results ;-)

And finally: If your father is planning to have his book published by a
professional publisher, it would be wise to contact the publisher and
ask in which form/fileformat(s) they want/expect to receive the finished
manuscript. Most publishers have a typesetting/layout departement (or
they contract it out), and sweating away at a layout for days, only to
realise that the publisher completely changes or disregards it doesn't
seem like a nice experience to me. If in the end the publisher just
wants some text and lots of photos, then you have a new challenge:
helping your father choose which text-editor to use...



> More Information: www.scribus.net
> You can subscribe to their mailing list as well, people are very 
> freindly and helpful.
> 
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