On Fri, 5 Feb 2010 12:29:00 -0800 (PST) "Tim Wescott" <[email protected]> dijo:
>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). I recently completed a book with a fairly complex layout. Here is a link to some screenshots: http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Success_stories#Book_on_Linguistics.2C_200_pages I started it with OOo. Although it ended up being 152 pages I never experienced speed issues. However, OOo drove me nuts with bugs when creating formulas (typeset formulas, not table formulas to calculate something). OOo is also a poor tool with graphics because they tend to jump all over the place, almost as bad as Word. There were a number of other annoyances as well. I had the book essentially finished in OOo, but the bugs were making it difficult to get correct output. So I started looking around for alternatives. Rich (whose comment I expected) turned me on to Lyx and I spent a week trying to get my head around it. Eventually I gave up. It just didn't click for me. Having said that, if you are experienced at LaTeX you will probably love it. I am very visual and love a program that is rigorously WYSIWYG. In the past I have used QuarkXPress, PageMaker and InDesign. While I love InDesign the most, I wanted FOSS. I had used Scribus on occasion in the past for small projects - fliers and the like. So I installed the latest development version (1.3.5.1) and set to work. It is not nearly as fully featured yet as InDesign, but I was able to complete the book with it. The results are excellent, and the current development version is very stable. The development version has a new feature called a Render Frame. You can use it to write anything with LaTeX, LilyPond, or any of several other tools. I have not actually used it, but I did play around with it a bit. I can see where it could be very useful for someone familiar with LaTeX but who also likes the WYSIWYG capabilities of Scribus. Having said all of that, Scribus is frustratingly slow with long documents. There would also be a learning curve for you that would be avoided if you stick to LaTeX or Lyx. But if you like being able to see on screen exactly what is going to come out in your PDF or print output, it is worth taking for a spin. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
