John Jason Jordan wrote: > On Mon, 11 May 2009 10:26:50 -0700 > Tim Wescott <[email protected]> dijo: > > >> My one published book was done using OpenOffice, also, then sent off to >> my publisher who used $$ tools to finish the book. I did my Master's >> thesis using LaTeX. >> >> I'm still trying to decide if the versatility and math typesetting >> capability of LaTeX is better than the WYSIWYG capability of OOo... >> >> Did you consider using LaTeX, and if so why did you choose OOo instead? >> > > This book was a real saga. > > My first book was done in WordPerfect/DOS. I remember spending hours > and reams of paper printing out each page over and over until I finally > got things positioned properly. > > Then I went to QuarkXPress, then PageMaker, briefly to Ventura, and > then to InDesign. I have InDesign CS installed on Windows 2000 in > Virtualbox. Truth be told, I could have done this job in a small > fraction of the time it took if I had done it in InDesign. But this is > my first book since moving to Linux four years ago. I was determined to > do it the FOSS way. > > When I first started writing and designing books the term "content" had > not yet entered the lexicon. Somewhere in the 90s I think it became > fashionable to think of content as separate from design. I think it was > the web that brought this about. Whatever, the idea is alien to me. The > design expresses what I am trying to say as much as the words. Bear in > mind that all my books are textbooks and workbooks. Not only are there > lots of graphics, there are no two pages that look alike. > > So when I started this book I decided to do it in OOo. I have been > using OOo as my only word processor for ten years, long before going to > Linux. I knew it had the layout power of WordPerfect, plus a GUI. I > wrote the whole thing and designed it as I went along. But by the time > I got to the end I was severely frustrated by the bugs. This is the > first book I have done that needs formulas (really just scalable > brackets), and the Math module in OOo has so many bugs that it took > forever to work around all the problems. Plus it was dropping > characters in the printout - just a general mess. Some may recall my > asking here for help trying to determine if it was Gnome or Ubuntu or > OOo, and if I might be able to eliminate the problems by going to an > older version on a different platform. Eventually I concluded that OOo > just had to go. It's great for writing ordinary text, but if you need > its less commonly used features it will probably mess up your work. I'd > certainly advise staying clear of its Math module. > > -- snip > What's really odd is that with around 400 formulas in mine*, you'd think that I'd be screaming about the math module, too. Yet aside from a certain clunkiness (what /does/ keep them from just using LaTeX syntax?) it worked fine for me.
I did have some problems with non-printing characters -- OOo has a problem with minus signs embedded in the text, and when you're writing a control systems text you tend to obsess about -1. This problem propagated all the way to the print version (and I haven't been able to get them to fix it, @#$%), which makes the book a confusing read in a couple of places. * "Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems, Elsevier/Newnes, 2006. -- Tim Wescott Wescott Design Services Voice: 503-631-7815 Cell: 503-349-8432 http://www.wescottdesign.com _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
