As Fred mentioned, if your book is a standard novel, Word might do the job. However, if you have an unusual layout, technical material (formulas, equations), more than one or two illustrations, footnotes, cross references, and citations, etc., etc., Word is going to be a royal pain. If the publisher insists on Word, they're an idiot and should be avoided at all costs. They don't know what they're doing. Find someone who will accept PostScript or even hardcopy (ready to print, with crop marks, etc.). Remember that a standard printer (not a print-on-demand shop) is going to print one nice clean copy from your file and use that to create the plates or blankets. Again, if you're going through an editor/publisher rather than straight to a printer, they may want to do the layout and formatting with their own tools, so you're wasting your time with anything elaborate. If they will accept LaTeX markup (many technical publishers do -- the CTAN library has lots of publisher macro packages), you may get a better deal by relieving them of much of the format work. Talk to them about the details before settling on a publisher.
Chris Knadle wrote: > On Wednesday 30 January 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> I agree with Ed. I published a couple of books. The first one was done in MS >> Word at the insistence of the publisher. It was a production nightmare. Word >> might be fine for novels, but when you have a tech manual, it doesn't cut it. >> > Likewise the other authors I spoke to said that publishers seem to accept > MS Word, which is not what I wanted to hear. I tried looking at > print-on-demand publishing websites to see what formats they accept, but most > don't seem to list that -- you'd think they would` _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Feb 6 - DBUS Mar 5 - Setting up a platform-independent home/small office network using Linux
