Well, the voices in my head have been getting steadily louder for months now, and I'm finally making out distinct statements from all the mumbling: "time to write another book". I know from experience that they'll settle down without chemical help if I actually get the book written, so I guess I'm committed (or perhaps I will be).
Anyone who's written a long work in OpenOffice and Word know that they both suck. Neither of them scale well, and both of them go _really slowly_ when you want to see the whole document. The OpenOffice version I used to do this had an edge over Word because it, at least, didn't inspire any power cycles -- but that writing experience came was years after the Microsoft writing experience. Probably the smoothest experience I had with this was writing my Master's thesis, which I did in LaTeX. But that was in 1990, and I don't see as many technical books coming out these days with the note "this book written and typeset in LaTeX" any more. The book is intended as a self-study guide and lab manual for learning automatic control theory. As such it'll have at least 27 8x10 color glossy photographs, with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, that will be included in the book to illustrate what is being done. Lots of graphs, and the occasional flowchart and/or class diagram will also make its way into the book. I may self-publish the book for a while, but I also intend to sell parts of it to Circuit Cellar magazine when I'm done, and when I think it's all good I'll be hawking it to Elsevier as a companion volume to my control theory book. And that's the first wrench in the works -- when I started that book I raised the possibility of doing it in LaTeX, and my editor crossed her fingers at me and started reciting biblical passages. She was cool with me using OpenOffice, though (perhaps knowing the alternative), but the production house that they chose to do the work had some difficulty with the job, to the extent that there are a number of drawings that lack their lowermost horizontal lines, and a number of '1's where there should be '-1's. So I'm a bit torn. I think I'll have an easier time of self-publishing if I use LaTeX (and LaTeX is distinctly better than OOo at typesetting equations), but I know I'll have more acceptance from Elsevier -- and probably from Circuit Cellar -- if I give them .doc files. I think the only really decisive "no" that I can come up to for LaTeX is if I can't find a decent way to get drawings and graphs into the document. So does anyone on the list write long works? What tools do you use? How do you like them? Is there anyone here with experience getting a LaTeX manuscript published? Is it still an accepted thing, or has it become Old News for technical work? TIA -- Tim Wescott Control systems and communications consulting http://www.wescottdesign.com Land line: 503.631.7815 Cell: 503.349.8432 _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
