2012/6/21 Rainer M Krug <[email protected]> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > > > The editorial work was done with free software in Linux Kubuntu. > > > > Very nice - could you possibly elaborate a bit which programs you used for > what? > > > > Of course he usual suspects: GIMP for image manipulation, LibreOffice for recieving and communicating with the authors early on, none of them used LaTeX/LyX. In the humanities it is common to recieve papers written in 20+ year old word processors and LibO is very good to open and convert such nasty things. I converted all files to plain text and imported them to LyX. I tested some conversion tools from LibO to LaTeX, but I think it is faster to use plain .txt. Of course this depends on the kind of papers, quality of the text, kind of publication and so on.
PDFMod is a very good program to manipulate and split PDF-files. Very useful to extract each paper when sending the papers back to authors. KDE may be somewhat heavy and perhaps not my favourite desktop environment, but it has several very useful scripts for Dolphin accessible from the right click menu. The scripts handle manipulating PDF:s, conversion of images and textfiles. Very useful things when producing a book and as a scholar in the humanities I am able to remember just a limited number of terminal commands. These scripts have saved me many hours and I do recommend KDE for heavy work. In the end I had to make a Postscript file and this was the only hickup. I could not produce the ps file in Linux but everything worked perfectly in Windows. I still don't know what went wrong in Linux, but I'll have another look on it now when I have no dead line and send a bug report if applicable. The ps file was converted to PDF in Adobe Distiller (another Windows victory) with the settings of the printing house. The printing house had never heard about LaTeX and is heavily entrenched in Adobes software. Still they accepted my PDF right off and our cooperation was very smooth. I think that they were surprised and impressed when I told them that the book had been made in Linux with free software that doesn't cost a single krona (Swedish coin). The cover was made by a specialist in InDesign and thus not produced in Linux. I think it is hard to replace InDesign for this, since the printing house expects an open InDesign file for final adjustments. I have typeset several academic books in InDesign before, but I must say that the process is simpler and with fewer hurdles in LaTeX and especially in LyX, despite the fact that I am still learning the program. This was my second book project in LyX. Nowadays I do all my writing in LyX and only use LibO Writer when I have to submit papers in word processor format. My wishlist includes an Adobe Distiller type of program for Linux and that more printing houses would learn about LaTeX/LyX and offer support and advice.
