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What publishing software do you use?
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Posted by Franz Grieser
Jan 12, 2007 at 02:17 PM
Hi.
This may be a bit off-topic (OTOH, I am sure a lot of people here create output that goes to a printer or to a web site): What kind of publishing tools do you use?
I am particularly interested in tools for publications that are 100 and more pages, contain images (color separation required) and tables, have a TOC and an index (generated by the tool) and have cross-references (i.e. links that bring you to a different part of the document). The documents have to be output to PDF files and are printed either on a digital printing machine or an offset printer. The tool should support Adobe Type 1 fonts as well as Truetype.
What do you use: Word, OpenOffice.org Writer, Indesign, Framemaker, Corel Ventura, Latex/Tex, Lyx ...? What would you recommend? What would you never use because of bad experience?
The reason why I ask: I earn part of my living writing and translating software documentation. A new customer asked me to update a 300 page manual written in OpenOffice.org Writer that contains a hundred bitmap images and a lot of cross-references. He decided to have it typeset using Indesign on a Mac (the previous versions were typeset in Quark). Now, the typesetter - who didn’t know Indesign before (he is a Photoshop wizard) struggled hard to get the Word files I prepared for him into Indesign. He did not manage to get Indesign to accept the Word styles and turn them into Indesign styles. I do not know if that is possible - but expect a tool designed for long publications to do so. Maybe the typesetter just does not know his tool.
Now, I think about doing the typesetting for the next manuals by myself. I typeset a number of books I published in the 80s and 90s using Ventura Publisher and Framemaker, later I had to use Word (never again, please) and am looking for a tool to do the job today.
BTW: OpenOffice.org Writer is not really an option: It crashed when I was halfway through the manual making the file unreadable (I only lost 10 minutes of work as I constantly backup and save the files under a new name). So I decided to split the document up, which cured the problems. I know that OpenOffice.org supports global documents - I might give that feature a try (but the experience I have made with that feature in Word was desastrous).
Greetings from Germany, Franz
Posted by Franz Grieser
Jan 12, 2007 at 02:19 PM
Hi.
There is one thing I forgot: The software should run on Windows or Mac OS X (either System 9 or 10.4).
Thanks, Franz
Posted by Graham Smith
Jan 12, 2007 at 02:58 PM
Franz,
>This may be a bit off-topic (OTOH, I am sure a lot of people here create output that
>goes to a printer or to a web site): What kind of publishing tools do you use?
No experience, other than a history of problems with Word and long documents, but it is well worth while looking at Lyx.
As a very friendly graphical front end to Latex, I suspect it has a lot going for it, certainly in terms of getting from text to well formatted, properly typeset document, it is immeasurably better than Word. I’m not sure about colour separations, but does Word do that?
An interesting read is at http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/08/15/1859251&from=rss
On Open Office, and I suspect you were unlucky with it, as it has a reputation of being more stable with long documents than Word.
Try having a read of for a comparison with http://www.techwr-l.com/techwhirl/magazine/technical/replaceframewithwriter.html
Having said all that I find it hard to believe that InDesign cannot cope with Word files.
If you see my earlier post on Lyx, you will gather that I am blown away by how good Lyx is at making it easy to write, but then turn out documents that look as if they have been professionally typeset. And of course it will run on Linux, Mac and Windows.
Main page is http://www.lyx.org/ and the Wiki is at http://wiki.lyx.org/
Having said that, my local printer would only take files as Quark or plain text with images supplied as Tiffs.
Graham
Posted by Cassius
Jan 12, 2007 at 05:03 PM
Franz Grieser wrote:
>Hi.
>
>This may be a bit off-topic (OTOH, I am sure a lot of people here create output that
>goes to a printer or to a web site): What kind of publishing tools do you use?
>
>Greetings from Germany, Franz
===============================
Franz,
I won’t even try my 45-year-old Deutsch. A suggestion which you must know: Try asking book publishers, particularly ones who sometimes publish authors’ works “as-is” without typesetting (i.e., in the file format the author sent). Springer Verlag and North Holland come to mind as well as some of the University Presses and small, specialty publishers such as publishers of art and photography.
Another possibility is asking the authors of books with the same sorts of material as you would have (graphics, etc.). I’ve often found email addresses of authors via Google searches.
-c
-c
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jan 12, 2007 at 05:28 PM
Franz,
I work for a publisher. We do not do our own typesetting, but farm it out to pros. Most of them, it seems, are shifting to InDesign (from Quark), and I know for a fact that it can accept long Word documents. Your typesetter just doesn’t know how to use it properly. For my own, shorter projects, I still use PageMaker… but it doesn’t meet your criteria, in that it doesn’t do hyperlinks (at least not to my knowledge).
Steve Z.