I am very grateful to everybody who shared their knowledge and experience. It all helped me to have better sense of the way Legacy and MS Word interact. I will keep all the replies for future reference. I now feel reassured that Word has the capacity to handle very large books with high resolution images. Therefore it would be safe to stick with Word and experimentation would not be a waste of time.
As suggested by Cathy, I watched the webinar on Word by Thomas MacEntee. I had seen it before but absorbed much on my second viewing. It contained a very valuable tip- each New Section within a document can have completely different or independent formatting. Each section is essentially a separate document but joined to others. I think that if I insert a Section Break at the top and bottom of each page on which I have grouped pictures, it will ensure that any formatting is contained and will not play havoc with endnotes etc. I hope to find time within the next few days to experiment with this. As Anna suggested, I had already planned to place grouped images (especially large ones) at the end of each chapter- hopefully this would also avoid any possible problems or confusion. John From: Ana Sent: Friday, February 10, 2017 11:43 AM To: Legacy User Group Subject: Re: [LegacyUG] Publishing hard copy / printed book I have been publishing books for decades, using all MS Word versions, before that a whole lot of typing. I have done genealogies & transcriptions of census, marriage bonds. Use Google & you will find all kinds of free tips, tricks & instructions for MS Word 7, which has powerful indexing capabilities, great spell check, search & replace, easy to insert pages or objects. YouTube has lots of tutorials, Microsoft.co m has oodles of help. Think back to high school/college & start with an outline or table of contents. MS Word is just a fancy-dancy typewriter. Save often & make & work on copies and/or versions. Try to get all your text finished. Then start with your inserts & pictures. For genealogies I usually make each generation a separate chapter (insert page break). I create an rtf report from Legacy & then do all the editing in MS Word. In my opinion, sentences in Legacy are stilted & often redundant. But Legacy produces the very best reports of any software out there. Test drive several of them & then decide the one you like. Sorry, Legacy - but in my humble opinion, Legacy Publishing Center is complicated & a whole lot of unnecessary work. I print pictures or drawings, on photo-paper to insert into my master copy. I group objects - before or after - each pertinent chapter, rather than within each chapter. However, there are so many different ways of handling pictures, objects. Try out a few. Within Word - so many options, size, placement, borders - Before you start, you should decide how you are going to publish - a bound book, printed pages with holes to put in a binder or an ebook & so on. A bound book has many limitations & restrictions, if that is the choice, work with your publisher before starting. Pages for a binder - search around for deals on paper. I would suggest at least a 28 pound (I like brilliant or bright white) & already punched holes. Pictures, maps & text, look so much better on heavy paper. On Wed, Feb 8, 2017 at 12:14 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: I use MS Word 2007. A number of months ago somebody in the LUG mentioned limitations or problems with MS Word while assembling a book, and suggested another word processing program (possibly an open-source one). I do not remember the original question put the LUG, or the alternative word processing program. My basic question is whether others have had problems preparing printed books in MS Word. If so, which alternative word processing program would they suggest? I get nervous about doing complex things on computers, so try to foresee and prevent problems, rather than sorting out messes later on. I have been gradually preparing pages in MS Word, to be later inserted where Place Holder pages have been set aside via the Legacy Publishing Center. In them, I have inserted high resolution photos, maps etc. Could large file sizes cause problems e.g. Does MS Word have a small clipboard or memory which does not handle rearranging chapters or pages with high resolution images? I presume that when you save a book in the Publication Center as an RTF file, it would be compatible with any word processing program. When everything is just right, I intend to save the whole book as a PDF file before printing. John -- LegacyUserGroup mailing list [email protected] To manage your subscription and unsubscribe http://legacyusers.com/mailman/listinfo/legacyusergroup_legacyusers.com Archives at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- LegacyUserGroup mailing list [email protected] To manage your subscription and unsubscribe http://legacyusers.com/mailman/listinfo/legacyusergroup_legacyusers.com Archives at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
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