On 05/29/2010 05:40 AM, Richard Brown wrote:
Success!
I am proudly holding my just-published 200 page book -an Italian
manual on how to set up and run humanist funerals- which was typeset
entirely in Lyx and includes text, tables, photos, external files and
even music scores. Thanks to Lyx it looks very professional indeed. I
am one happy bear.
But I have to say that I'd never have got there without the help and
active support which I have received over the last year from this
list, every time I ran into something I couldn't do- which was often!
So- a very big and heartfelt THANKS to everyone! You are the tops.
Congratulations! And good choice of authoring tools!
My first book-length work was my master's thesis, which I did on Emacs
in LaTeX, because my thesis advisor insisted -- thank you Dr. Enge, for
turning me on to LaTeX! My second was a manual for internal use at the
company I was working at, describing the inner workings of a fairly
complex system. It was done in Microsoft Word, and really bogged down
as it got big splitting it into chapters helped, but it was still way
clunky. My third one was a book
(http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html) authored in OpenOffice
-- OpenOffice is nice for memos, but like Microsoft Office it really
bogs down after 100 pages or so, and slows down by at least n^2 per
size. I had floated the notion of doing it in LaTeX, but
Elsevier/Newnes couldn't conceive of the idea of a book in anything but
Microsoft (this was in spite of being a division of Elsevier --
apparently Newnes is, or was, fairly independent of the "academic
Elsevier") -- I cheated and did it in OOo, exported to Microsoft, which
generated some problems in production.
My second book will be presented to a publisher as a LaTeX manuscript
and they can damn well take it or leave it, even if I have to hunt down
a production house for them myself. I do _not_ want to ever go back to
doing it on a 'normal' office word processor!
--
Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
Voice: 503-631-7815
Cell: 503-349-8432
http://www.wescottdesign.com
