On Fri, 5 Feb 2010, Tim Wescott wrote: > 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.
Tim, That's because the publishers remove that line. Write in LaTeX, but take a look at the LyX GUI front end <http://www.lyx.org/>. I wrote my book with it (Springer-Verlag took it camera-ready), and use it for all my writing. Unless I have to share writing with colleagues or agency staff. > 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. Yup. LaTeX/LyX is what you need. > 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. Rich van der Lans self-publishes his book, "The SQL Guide to SQLite" via Lulu. > 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. Elsevier has document classes for LyX/LaTeX that a number of folks use so it may be that the company has come into the 20th century by now. > 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. Feh! Of course you can; .jpg, .png, .eps, .pdf. I like to use PSTricks for my vector-graphics and there's never a problem with LyX/LaTeX. > 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? See above. Check out my book on amazon.com: "Quantifying Environmental Impact Assessments Using Fuzzy Logic." Rich _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
