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Posted by Graham Rhind
Oct 17, 2007 at 06:30 AM
At the risk of flogging this one to death, and just for the sake of completeness, my book does not contain multiple tables of contents, footnotes, multiple appendices, cross-referencing and so on. It does contain a table of contents but that is added at a later stage after conversion to pdf.
So those parts of the process are never a requirement - just the storing and manipulation of the text, tables and graphics. Word (and I’m talking about Word 2000 and its predecessor) has a clever way of opening large documents by opening only part of them and then opening other sections later as you scroll down. Other programs try to load the whole document in one go, which meant in my case I could have decorated my office whilst waiting.
And, as I mentioned, I don’t find Word aggravating and I do find it reliable. Naturally it won’t suit everybody, but what software does?
Graham
PS - I’m just starting my fourth book - in Word :-)
Chris Thompson wrote:
>Wow! I can’t imagine writing a 1100 page book in Word. For documents of that length, I’d
>encourage you to investigate tools specifically designed for that kind of job, such
>as LaTeX, FrameMaker, DocBook, or any of the variety of SGML tools. Not just for speed
>and usability reasons, but also because long documents tend to have advanced needs
>(e.g. multiple tables of contents, a main table of contents and then tables of
>contents by chapter, multiple appendices, heavy cross-referencing,
>cross-referencing between footnotes, etc.), and in my experience Word tends not to
>be reliable when using those features in combination, even for documents in the 30-50
>page range. Most of the long document-oriented tools tend to be bulletproof in
>comparison. There’s something to be said for consistently reliable, less
>aggravating tools.
>
>—Chris
>
>
>Graham Rhind wrote:
>>Absolutely. Before I moved
>it to Whizfolders my second book was in
>>a single Word document - 1100 pages. I admit
>that at that point Word was straining and
>>slowing significantly, which is why I cut
>into into chunks and put it into
>>Whizfolders. That Word file could not be opened in
>any other word processor I ever
>>tried - they fell over due to the size of the document.
>
>
Posted by quant
Oct 17, 2007 at 08:46 AM
Graham Rhind wrote:
>At the risk of flogging this one to death, and just for the sake of completeness, my book
>does not contain multiple tables of contents, footnotes, multiple appendices,
>cross-referencing and so on. It does contain a table of contents but that is added at a
>later stage after conversion to pdf.
it must be very strange book without any of the basic features ...
>
>So those parts of the process are never a
>requirement - just the storing and manipulation of the text, tables and graphics.
>Word (and I’m talking about Word 2000 and its predecessor) has a clever way of opening
>large documents by opening only part of them and then opening other sections later as
>you scroll down. Other programs try to load the whole document in one go, which meant in
>my case I could have decorated my office whilst waiting.
- writing 1000 pages document in word, you must be either masochist or bill gate’s relative.
- books typeset in word are ugly, it’s a fact
Take advice from Chris, for example in Latex, you’d be typing just text, and all of the formatting is done automatically by the software when your work is compiled.
>
>And, as I mentioned, I don’t
>find Word aggravating and I do find it reliable. Naturally it won’t suit everybody,
>but what software does?
You were saying that no office suit could convert the M$ documents properly. Well, it’s not their problem, it’s because of proprietary M$ formats! Now you have a chance to test and start working with free soft (for example Open Office which is great) that implements open document format ... take that chance and soon you’ll see you never get back to M$ office
>PS - I’m just starting my fourth book - in Word :-)
can you post a link to any of your books? Is it on Amazon or google books for a preview?
Posted by Graham Rhind
Oct 17, 2007 at 09:31 AM
I’m not sure I want to dignify some of these comments with a reply, but here goes:
quant wrote:
>it must be very
>strange book without any of the basic features ...
William Shakespeare managed without footnotes and indices. It is a reference book and is structured in such a way that only the chapter names are required to find the required data, as each chapter has the same structure. Indices and tables of contents would cause problems anyway because it is currently published as a pdf instead of hard copy, and the page numbers are dependent upon the size of paper being used if printed. The book therefore has no page numbers. And nobody has ever complained about its layout - in fact, in a survey of users I did last year nobody wanted the format or structured altered. So there we are - I make no apologies for the for the form the book takes - not all books are academic tomes.
>writing 1000 pages document in word, you must be either masochist or bill gate’s
>relative.
>- books typeset in word are ugly, it’s a fact
Neither, and that perhaps proves my point that Word could manage the task very well - I have a very low tolerance to software glitches, as you’ll know from my feelings about Ultra Recall, for example. I’ll hop products as soon as they give me problems. As I mentioned above, the book is published as a pdf, not typeset, but we all know that definitive statements about beauty and ugliness are not grounded. As it happens the book has to use a single font because it contains data in hundreds of languages, and only one font set allowed me to do that. Personally I don’t like the font or the layout very much, but it’s for reference and nobody cares as long as they can get their information from it.
>You were saying that no office suit could
>convert the M$ documents properly. Well, it’s not their problem, it’s because of
>proprietary M$ formats! Now you have a chance to test and start working with free soft
>(for example Open Office which is great) that implements open document format ...
>take that chance and soon you’ll see you never get back to M$ office
With respect, I did not apportion any blame as to the reason for incompatibility between office suites. As I also mentioned I HAVE tested all of these programs - OpenOffice, Ability and Lotus (older version). They were not up to the task I set for them. As I also said, other software will suit other people for what they require. Not me.
>can you post a link to any of your books? Is it on
>Amazon or google books for a preview?
Yes, but that wouldn’t be useful to this discussion because in all three cases the publisher has typeset the hard copy versions and added tables of contents, indices and so on according to their own house rules. They typeset in a program other than Word, obviously (and made a right hash up of it), but I supplied the data in Word and that is how I maintain the files (as in one case the book is updated and released every 6 months). That book’s software link page is at http://www.grcdi.nl/book2.htm - there’s a sample from the book there, but that’s been printed from Whizfolders, not Word.
I get a little weary of constant Microsoft bashing just for the sake of it, and I don’t really want to get into one of those discussions. My point was that alternatives to MS Office are not always as all encompassing as they claim and are not in all cases a worthy alternative.
Graham
Posted by quant
Oct 17, 2007 at 09:54 AM
>to find the required data, as each chapter has the same structure. Indices and tables
>of contents would cause problems anyway because it is currently published as a pdf
>instead of hard copy, and the page numbers are dependent upon the size of paper being
the chapter numbering/references to page numbers, indexes, ... it’s all done automatically in any decent soft (by changing the page format/size/... all the references would be updated)
> The book therefore has no page numbers.
no comment, this is where the conversation ends ;-)
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Oct 17, 2007 at 01:31 PM
I work for a small, nonprofit publisher. We prefer to receive manuscripts in either RTF, plain text, or Word files. We then put them into Word to go through the copy editing phase. We discourage authors from doing any formatting of their text themselves, because in most cases that all has to be stripped out anyway.
I am not sure, but I suspect, that we are pretty typical of most publishers (though perhaps not academic publishers). So I would suggest that authors not worry about the formatting abilities of the writing software they use, and just find the software that feels most comfortable and aids in the actually writing and re-writing of the work.
Steve Z.