Derek Smithies wrote:
There are two issues involved in this thread. The first is writing, and the tools that can be used for it. The second issue is publishing, and the tools that can be used.<snip>
Sure, there are people that complain that LaTex doesn't do what they want. Yep, LaTeX is not for generating brochures. LaTeX is for generating books.
Sorry Wesley, but I speak from experience of writing a book, and watching others write books. The saddest thing is when you watch someone work with word, and then it goes kapput, and the document is "gone"
Writing: Any word processor that you are comfortable with will do, really. If Abi does the job for Wesley, great stuff and way to go.
Publishing: This gets more involved. This is where the completed text gets formated and merged with images and tables - and this goes for books and brochures alike. Quite frankly, the tool does not guarantee the outcome. Its not how well you know your tools that matters, its what the layout designer knows about layout, style, typefaces, formatting, etc etc etc that makes or break the book. If the tool can handle the requirements, great stuff and way to go. While latex is the way to go for a sizeable group, and docbook for a sizeable second group, OpenOffice is the way to go for a third sizeable group (I fall in this group). And a fourth group will find that Scribus fulfils their requirements. In short: Freedom of choice, but is should be based on requirements.
Long lives Penguin Publishing.
So write on, Wesley! Happy abi-ing to you, I say :-)
And happy latexing and happy docbooking and so on to the rest,
Jaco
ps: A note on OpenOffice: It has gone a long way to become a viable alternative to Adobe Framemaker. In fact, its implementation of frames is in general more powerfull, but easier to use, than that of the Frame King itself. OOo is not quite there yet: its image importing is buggy, and there are sadly not adequate resources to address all the known issues at this stage. :-(
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