http://www.osnews.com/story/13044/Book_Writing_Applications_in_Linux Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:26:22 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread?76182 http://osnews.com/thread?76182 I didn't read it in depth yet, but from what I read so far, this is really a very nice, informative and informed article.

Thanks a lot. Tue, 20 Dec 2005 19:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76187 http://osnews.com/thread?76187 LYX is not the same as LaTeX. why did you not include it? Tue, 20 Dec 2005 19:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (modmans2ndcoming) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76191 http://osnews.com/thread?76191 A tool that is often overlooked for anything other than programming...

A good version control tool like Subversion would be of great benefit as well. I've come to use Subversion for everything important from source code, letters, my resume rather recently, to MP3 files.

This makes backups easy, change tracking even easier, and gives me a nice time based snapshots! On top of all of that it also allows me to work any any one of my multiple computers (my desktop, my laptop, or even a friend's computer with svn+ssh) without fear of losing anything!

Of course that really biases the tool selection toward a text based approach like \LaTeX{} because then you also get the HUGE benefit of being able to see the differences between the versions easily!Edited 2005-12-20 19:44 Tue, 20 Dec 2005 19:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (twowheels) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76192 http://osnews.com/thread?76192 It's a well written article. But the author does ignore the fact that your choice will most likely ultimately be determined by the publisher you are working with rather than any personal preference you have.

As someone who has written published books, doing the writing on both Linux and FreeBSD, I have to say that most of the time, if you are working with a publisher, the only real option will be OpenOffice.

Why? Because your publisher will almost certainly use MS Word. And most likely, they will use some of the advanced features of MS Word--particularily revision tracking / document collaboration to make it easier for you to communicate with your editors (yes, usually there will be more than one) and accept / reject suggested changes and so on.

OpenOffice is the only one of the mentioned options that has good support for MS Word's revision tracking and document collaboration features. In fact, it worked flawlessly and I was able to work freely with my editors who were using MS Word.

Lyx is nice. But only the most technical publishers will accept LaTeX documents, or even Postscript. The vast majority will require a commonly supported word processor format. And many will only work with MS Word because of document collaboration and such.Edited 2005-12-20 19:47 Tue, 20 Dec 2005 19:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Simba) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76213 http://osnews.com/thread?76213 I thought about writing an article on this subject, but after some reflection I realized that it would be useless to anyone but me. I've written three books and contributed to and edited others, including a top-selling Linux book. I've never used anything other than high-end word processors for all of my work. Word 97 when it was the best and brightest, then WordPerfect 10 and 12, and now TextMaker and StarOffice. I need to see typos and spelling errors as they happen because I write organically, sort of in waves of drafting, revising, and editing. Other writers need outlines first, then chapter synopses and such.

Every writer is different, and will use different tools according to preference and need. There is no end to the evangelists pushing Emacs and Vim and (especially) LaTeX. You can't use these effectively as a professional writer because publishes almost exclusively work with Word .DOC files, although some will take WordPerfect .WPD as well. So yeah, you could write in Emacs, save as a text file, and then go through all 300+ pages again in OpenOffice or Word or whatever to put all of the formatting back in for the finished manuscript. But you'd be silly to do that without a very good reason.

There is a program called NewNovelist which helps facilitate outlining and other writing preparation. It's pretty cool, but as I said, I don't really write like that.

Personally I would love to have a word processor that allowed me to do a sort of storyboard or timeline across the top or bottom of the screen while the text window is open. A spelling and grammar checker (please don't make me explain why grammar checkers are important. The short answer is: they catch correctly spelled typos) that checks in real time (not after the fact in a popup window -- I hate that!), and excellent font rendering. I have actually considered writing such a program by isolating and specializing the word processor in OpenOffice.org. Tue, 20 Dec 2005 20:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Valour) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76224 http://osnews.com/thread?76224 Probably because "The motivation behind this article was to find a better way specifically for liberal arts authors".

I can easitly see a liberal arts author spending the four or five hours it'd take him to learn what he needs to know about Lyx to get the job done.

On the other hand, while I dearly love LaTeX, I'd much rather see an author concentrate on writing content, rather than spending the weeks it'd take to learn what he'd need to know about LaTeX. Tue, 20 Dec 2005 20:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (KyleCardoza) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76231 http://osnews.com/thread?76231 Certainly some authors do more than others, but isn't it hard enough to find someone expert enough in the field enough to create content to also expect them to be typographers and layout specialists, on top of the production details of getting a book printed? I would think that kind of effort would be sourced at the publisher.

Certainly the days of shipping off a stack of handwritten legal pads off to the publisher may be mostly long gone (though many writers do still write this way, they just happen to have their own typist key it in to something more managable), and while I'm sure authors may want some input in to the overall look of the book, many of the modern technical books have there L&F dictated by the publisher from the get go it seems to me. Many journals also dictate format, and magazines simply have the most strange layout constraints that the author probably is completely hands off.

So, while structuring the work seems important, fixating on the typography is stretching it a bit I would think. Tue, 20 Dec 2005 20:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (whartung) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76232 http://osnews.com/thread?76232 On the other hand, while I dearly love LaTeX, I'd much rather see an author concentrate on writing content, rather than spending the weeks it'd take to learn what he'd need to know about LaTeX.

Well, it took me one afternoon to get the first 30 pages of my thesis from OpenOffice to TeX. Main reason to do that was that I was wasting too much time fighting the way OpenOffice dealt with embedded images. TeX produced an excellent layout without me even worrying about layout at all, instead focussing on the content. Tue, 20 Dec 2005 20:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76238 http://osnews.com/thread?76238 I'm a tech writer/hardware reviewer, and I've found that Ulysses is probably the best tool that I've found for the job so far. It's basically a word processor, but with a twist -- it's oriented towards the out-of-order work that creative writing is.

I would urge anyone who likes to do some writing now and then, but finds the typical office-oriented word processor to be a piece of cumbersome crap, to take a look: http://www.blue-tec.com/ulysses/

And no, I don't work for them. I just like their application. Oh, you'll need to be running a real OS too, since this is an OS X-only app. ;-) Tue, 20 Dec 2005 20:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Tom K) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76249 http://osnews.com/thread?76249 I have to agree that LyX is GREAT for some uses... for instance its the perfect too to write a school paper, masters thesis, PhD papers, and even academic and medical journal articles etc.

But not sure if its the right tool to write a book for random-house. Tue, 20 Dec 2005 20:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Milo_Hoffman) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76254 http://osnews.com/thread?76254 I have to write a lot of papers, and this article was really helpful.

Until now my primary tools is MS Word 2003. It can do everything: structuring, spell and grammar check, easy viewing, layout control, and so on. I like the option in Word and OO to add temporary comments and markers that do not show up in the printout. If it only exported to readable HTML... Tue, 20 Dec 2005 20:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (evert) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76258 http://osnews.com/thread?76258 The whole article provides a good overview, but gives the reader the impression that one should not get to see LaTeX Sourcecode for writing a book.

I consider Lyx a good approach, but it has disadvanteges when it comes to finetuning of the output. On the other hand learning of LaTeX is not that difficult for somebody who is willing to read documentation and work with text based editors.

LaTeX does provide all the functionalty for professionel/scientific books. However, when it comes to mainly layout based documents LaTeX is the completetly wrong application and DTP programms are needed - but that applies to all the programms in the list of this article.

Therefore I really miss Kile (KDE Integrated LaTeX Environment) in the list of editors for Linux. One could of course add emacs and other editors with LaTeX enchancment to this list as well.

The main problem of acceptance is that LaTeX is not standardised. If have heard of one article which only accepts basic MS Word documents and converts them to LaTeX before printing.

Matthias Tue, 20 Dec 2005 21:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76265 http://osnews.com/thread?76265 Yes yes yes. I cannot live without Subversion. I can prepare my materials on 6 different desktops in two different, remote places + ssh on server. Everytime up to date, everytime knowing there are at least 2-3 nearly complete safety copies on different disks in different computers in different buildings. Tue, 20 Dec 2005 21:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76274 http://osnews.com/thread?76274 This is a great article; hopefully there will be a lot of these on OSNews. I'm about to start with my Master's Thesis so I'd love to hear what everyone else is using.

As to the fact that most Publishers use MS Word...hmm I bet if one day that woman who wrote those harry potter books decides to write with LaTex and would only let publishers that read LaTex publish her book, maybe every publisher would switch:) Tue, 20 Dec 2005 21:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76275 http://osnews.com/thread?76275 This is one of the better articles I've seen in a while and pretty informative too. I didn't see much bias in it at all. I was expecting a jab at Microsoft on every page due to the linux keyword in the title, but there was only one mention of them and even that wasn't a jab but pretty much the truth. MS Word is good, but handling several hundred page document it just doesn't do well at it.

More articles like this are needed. Keep up this kind of good work, because you have convinced me to try some other writing applications on linux. Tue, 20 Dec 2005 21:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (TaterSalad) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76277 http://osnews.com/thread?76277 A screenshot of Word 2003 with document structure and styles & formatting:

http://www.evert.net/temp/word2003.png Tue, 20 Dec 2005 21:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (evert) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76278 http://osnews.com/thread?76278 LaTeX is not at all prepared for book writers, in fact it is not prepared to be used by any content-creator unless he/she needs to:

a) create a content in an already set framework (eg. using dedicated style for a publisher accepting LaTeX entries)

b) create very complicated maths / music score (I mean he REALLY knows what he is going to achieve).

TeX/Latex is _typesetting_ machine, so it _typesets_ a content, nothing more. It's up to an author to provide the structure of content, and there are no aids/handicaps.

In fact if one uses basic classes, he just gets nice output. But if you want to get REAL BOOK (I mean good typesetting on bookstore level) you must break with creating content and work with low level non-structural typesetting commands/macros. This work is to be done on editor's side --- in fact it is my job, I earn by typesseting books with LaTeX, not creating them , absolutely not on writer's/author's side. Tue, 20 Dec 2005 21:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76280 http://osnews.com/thread?76280 The intended audience is not defined and application categories are mixed.

It isn't clear why lyx qualifies but vim+latexsuite or emacs+auctex doesn't. A occasional document writer would never even look at these applications and a professional writer should be willing to learn the right tool for the job. Dismissing two popular editors because of there learning curve would be logical for once-in-a-lifetime witers, but why should daily users dismiss it?

A programming editor, a DTP app, an office suite, and lyx should be comparable because...? You might as well include Scribus, which is a kick-ass DTP program.

Disclaimer: I am biased towards vim, latexsuite, darcs (revision control), and scribus. Tue, 20 Dec 2005 21:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (psilo) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76281 http://osnews.com/thread?76281 > I'd much
> rather see an author concentrate on writing content,
> rather than spending the weeks it'd take to learn what
> he'd need to know about LaTeX.

I agree it takes much time to learn LaTeX, but it pays off in time. Even short 20 page articles are hard to maintain with wordprocessors like Word if the output must be professional quality (consistent style and references), but with LaTeX it ends up to be fast and easy to change style and have professional quality with both styles.

Whatever the tool, doing layout manually is waste of effort in the long term. Earlier this year we composed a book of 450 pages from 40 different authors. Almost everyone submitted us their work in LaTeX ( http://samos.et.tudelft.nl/samos_v/ ), and it was enjoyable to edit those documents because we could get professional look almost automatically. Some authors submitted their document with wrong style, but with LaTeX it was possible to correct that by editing just a few lines on each document :-)

These days I like Lyx and LaTeX because they save manual layout work. Anyway, I've been thinking to write my documents in Wiki too :-) With a good browser and nice fonts it's almost enjoyable to write articles.

Regards,
Heikki Orsila Tue, 20 Dec 2005 21:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76282 http://osnews.com/thread?76282 texmacs Tue, 20 Dec 2005 21:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76293 http://osnews.com/thread?76293 I wish that everybody would use styles correctly no matter which program that choose to use... I'm always the evangelist when it comes to that as I can't hardly stand to edit a document produced by anybody who doesn't use them.

That said, MS Word 2003 has a horrible memory leak or other bug where when you're using styles it becomes VERY slow, stops responding, and stops updating (or even updates incorrectly) when using styles in a large document. I have to close the program every 1/2 hour at the least if I'm using styles. Sad. Makes it hard to convert people. I prefer OO.org myself. I believe that OO does a better job of separating style & content than MS Word. I also prefer to have to double click (as in OO) to apply a style (ooops!). I also dislike how Word automatically creates styles form other people's manual changes and then they sometimes won't go away when you apply a style correctly. Tue, 20 Dec 2005 22:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (twowheels) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76298 http://osnews.com/thread?76298 I'm another person who uses Kile to write my papers with, and the LaTeX that you need to know is learnable in less than an hour, IMHO.

I'm no geek, I use PCs to get my work done, and LaTeX is great for letting you concentrate on the structure and content of the paper rather than be distracted by the layout. LaTeX served me well while I was doing the dissertation for my law degree, and I'm using it for all the assignments and the dissertation for my MBA. Tue, 20 Dec 2005 22:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76305 http://osnews.com/thread?76305 > MS Word is good, but handling several hundred page
> document it just doesn't do well at it.

True, but typically one doesn't write entire books in a single file. They are usually one file per chapter to facilitate easier editing, and allow editors and authors to work at the same time (editors can be editing existing chapters which will then be sent back to the author for revision while the author is cranking out new chapters at the same time).

It's only after the book is entirely written that a single file of it is produced by batch processing all of the chapter files. And that file will usually be a PDF proof. Not a Word document.Edited 2005-12-20 22:32 Tue, 20 Dec 2005 22:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Simba) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76306 http://osnews.com/thread?76306 "On the other hand, while I dearly love LaTeX, I'd much rather see an author concentrate on writing content, rather than spending the weeks it'd take to learn what he'd need to know about LaTeX."

Weeks? Why would it take weeks? What on earth would they be trying to learn that would take more than ten minutes? It would still be a sadly impractical choice but not for learning curve reasons. Perhaps someone may write a literary extension like the musical musitex. Tue, 20 Dec 2005 22:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76311 http://osnews.com/thread?76311 Oh, and with all the talk of LaTeX, typically is overkill unless you are writing something mathematical or scientific where you need to write up lots of formulas and such.

troff is a lot simpler, and is really quite a capable markup languages. O'Reilly still accepts troff as far as I know, and I also know authors who have written books for O'Reilly using troff.

troff's markup language is also quite a bit simpler to learn than LaTeX. Tue, 20 Dec 2005 22:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Simba) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76321 http://osnews.com/thread?76321 Wow!

That Ulysses application is pretty neat. Didn't take me so long to figure out the interface either. I particularly like the full screen mode. Thanks for the tip! Tue, 20 Dec 2005 22:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76339 http://osnews.com/thread?76339 LaTeX is awesome for research papers. The ability to manage the support materials that go into a paper are astounding. Tue, 20 Dec 2005 23:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (modmans2ndcoming) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76348 http://osnews.com/thread?76348 When I was a phd student in 96, it was very easy to notice when a paper has been written using LateX: either all the images ended up at the end of the section, or (in the good case) the images were only put the page after the reference.

This was very annoying because to read the doc you had to do a lot of back and forth, ugh!

Either Latex has improved a lot or we do not have the same view on what is 'professional output'.. Tue, 20 Dec 2005 23:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (renox) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76356 http://osnews.com/thread?76356 "It isn't clear why lyx qualifies but vim+latexsuite or emacs+auctex doesn't."

Technically yes, far more powerful. But can you teach it in a reasonable period to the particular people? And can you feel safe leaving them to use it with phone support?

Don't think so. Its not stupidity. You can be dealing with the world's leading expert on the evolution of the English Common Law in the Middle Ages. Its just minds that work in a different way, and the important thing is, giving them stuff that they can and will use, and be relatively independent of you once they are using it. They will accept Lyx. I don't think there's any chance of teaching them Vim.

Similarly Kile. Really want to keep them away from Latex source.

Scribus: isn't the problem that it is true page layout? Whereas what we want is to separate the logical structuring of the docoment from page layout? I don't know Scribus however, so this may be wrong.

Texmacs, as someone suggested, yes, a real alternative. Maybe not quite as familiar in look and feel as Lyx. Tue, 20 Dec 2005 23:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (alcibiades) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76363 http://osnews.com/thread?76363 I love articles like this that lead me to try new things, in this case Lyx. And it's a very informative article too. Thank you, Mr Author.

However, I've been over many hundreds of manuscripts over the years as a job of work and 99/100 are in a standard-issue word processor, usually MS Word. With a few exceptions, authors are not technical types. They want something that "Just Works" and that they feel safe with, and publishers want a predictable format to deal with, probably specifying "MS Word compatible" in the original publishing contract or in a house style guide. In my experience, the exceptions are highly technical works for which a standard WP won't do or where the author is contracted to provide some of the design as well, perhaps templated around a page-make-up proggie. Very, very occasionally, delivery has been taken off old manual typewriters or even hand-written scraps, but only if the book is saleable enough to justify the expense of having it cleaned-typed on a PC.

An author's manuscript needs to be very easy to read (or speed-read), edit and annotate. That means minimal formatting in double-spacing and fairly large type. The design stuff all comes later. One reason is that the size, look and length of a book are also a function of its niche in the market, and that needs to be got very clear before any design work takes place. It's no good offering a book of 450 pages at 9.99 in a market that really wants 320 pages at 6.99, or vice versa. Tue, 20 Dec 2005 23:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (moleskine) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76374 http://osnews.com/thread?76374 That probably means that the people who wrote those articles either didn't know LaTeX very well or that they chose to have their figures in the end of the document. Though I think the default LaTeX handling of the figure/table placement could be much better, it's actually very easy to "tweak".

For each figure, you have a placement option which tells LaTeX where it should be placed. For instance "h" means "here", "!h" means "here, pretty please", and "H" means "here, damnit!". You can also set your preference for placing the figures on the top ("t") or bottom ("b") of a page, or indeed on a separate page in the end ("p").

I don't know what typesetting/word processing software you use, but I generally recognize articles written in MS Word by their poor typesetting, especially when it comes to equations. Even with MathType, equations in Word don't look very good, IMO. Also, my personal experiences with long reports in Word haven't exactly been very good; in one instance I ended up with all the figures in the end of the document, after about 30 blank pages. Tue, 20 Dec 2005 23:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (CrimsonScythe) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76385 http://osnews.com/thread?76385 I have been involved in making the layout of some scientific books (in the field of Plant Physiology). First of all, it is simply false that most publishers prefer Word documents. Many publishers prefer camera-ready copies or PDF files. This gives authors and editors pretty much freedom. The books that I helped with were written with Word, because that is how manuscripts usually come in fields outside Mathematics or Computer Science. In *my* experience WYSIWYG word processors are really bad for formatting books. It is hard to get the layout consistent and tidy. Besides that the WYSIWYG interrupts writing and editing, since it is pretty distractive.

Naturally LaTeX and are good choice, or for computer-related manuals DocBook plus JadeTeX (which can be a pain at times, to get the printed output straight). It is funny that troff is not mentioned here. While it may seem a bit archaic to some, it is a nice typesetting language, which allows for a lot of customization. Both at the troff level, and at Postscript level. Besides that troff files can be easily changed with the standard UNIX text utilities.

Troff is quite easy when used with the mm or mom macros:
http://faustus.dyn.ca/mom/mom.html

Troff was used, and continues to be used for many good UNIX related books. The excellent troff.org site provides a list of books typesetted with troff/groff:

http://www.troff.org/pubs.html

(Yes, I know that troff is not usable for everyone, but it is a good tool for more tech-savvy writers.) Wed, 21 Dec 2005 00:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (danieldk) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76407 http://osnews.com/thread?76407 I really hope that OOo v2 improves on the bibliographic component, because it could be a killer app against Word+Endnote. I am studying Litt at the MA level and so I must use MLA style formatting. When I did my BA I wrote a lot of papers in LaTeX, but frankly, the current MLA style for latex is just sub-par for a more complex document like an MA thesis. I have to stick with Endnote/Word right now because it's the only package that will give me a proper, up-to-date formatting of my bib, and which will allow me to follow my university's style guidelines without painful hacking.

People always bitch that WYSIWG is bad because you are formatting as you write, but goddamnit! you can't get a good sense of where your writing's at if you don't have a decent visual feedback. This is no different than working on a typewriter: you did formatting and content at the same time. Using latex is no different: you still put the italics and bold while you type. But instead of seeing bold{blahblah}, I'd rather see it properly formatted onscreen. Footnotes in latex are in the middle of the text, so you need to read

text text text text text text text text footnote{text text text }text text text

Whereas having

text text text text text text (1) text text text text text

(1) text text text text

Is much more practical and easy to apprehend.

I wish for a real model/view writing system, a bit like LyX, where you can see approximate formatting, but keep a strong structure that you can abstract from the view. However, LyX has an ugly UI, and I'm not going to limit myself to MLA latex bib style. Wed, 21 Dec 2005 00:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76413 http://osnews.com/thread?76413 Yeah, the full-screen mode is awesome -- no interruptions, just simple, sexy yellow text on a black screen.

No problem, by the way. Wed, 21 Dec 2005 00:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Tom K) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76445 http://osnews.com/thread?76445 You could have also included *Kile* which is another Latex editor. Even though it does not have a WYSIWYG feel, it is very powerful and easy to use. Wed, 21 Dec 2005 01:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (jbalmer) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76447 http://osnews.com/thread?76447 Kile is an excellent way to shorten the LaTeX learning curve and reduce syntax errors. I do agree with Anonymous above that seeing the formatted output as one writes is very helpful, though. How many Web designers do you know who upload raw HTML to the server without having first previewed it? Didn't think so.

What would be nice is a LaTeX editor like Kile with a split window, one showing the raw LaTeX code, the other showing a WYSWIG version of the same code - interpreted and updated in real time, or, if that is too much of a cpu hog, updated every few seconds.

-Gnobuddy Wed, 21 Dec 2005 01:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76450 http://osnews.com/thread?76450 "There is a program called NewNovelist which helps facilitate outlining and other writing preparation. It's pretty cool, but as I said, I don't really write like that. "

I see lyx not by itself, but fitting into a larger workflow. Imagine NewNovelist at the top of the pyramid, and latex near the bottom. This works even better when you have writers collaborating. Wed, 21 Dec 2005 01:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76466 http://osnews.com/thread?76466 Once upon time, was FrameMaker. Its available on Windows and Solaris Sparc. It's hands down the best writing tool I ever used. On linux, Kword is the closest I've come to Frame on linux. Wed, 21 Dec 2005 02:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (zizban) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76473 http://osnews.com/thread?76473 Renox wrote:
> either all the images ended up at the end of the section,
> or (in the good case) the images were only put the page after the reference.

I don't know how much LaTeX has improved since then, but using current versions that would mean authors had instructed LaTeX to put figures into wrong places. The best default policy is not to instruct where the pictures are put.

Regards,
Heikki Orsila Wed, 21 Dec 2005 02:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76476 http://osnews.com/thread?76476 Not so long ago I read an interview with the author of a nifty program called Kdissert - http://freehackers.org/~tnagy/kdissert/

I believe that kdissert is close to TreePad in concept since it is some sort of mind-mapping tool but its main purpose is to generate proper structured documents in several formats such as pdf documents (based on LaTeX : article, book), pdf presentations (based on LaTeX : Beamer, Prosper), text processing files (OpenOffice.org Writer), plain text and internet documents (html) that you can open and edit later with your favorite editor or word processor.

Since you start adding content as shapes on its canvas and then link these shapes to each other, you can use this feature as some sort of "visual" outliner.

I haven´t spent too much time playing with it but I´ve seen some of the documents that it can output and was quite impressed.

DeadFish Man Wed, 21 Dec 2005 02:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76500 http://osnews.com/thread?76500 "First of all, it is simply false that most publishers prefer Word documents. Many publishers prefer camera-ready copies or PDF files. This gives authors and editors pretty much freedom."

That hasn't been my experience at all. Because typically PDF files are not editable. And I have actuallyy never worked with a publisher who wanted camera ready copies. In fact, most of them specifically say they *do not* want camera ready files. They have their own layouts that are common for their imprint ect, and they have people whos job it is to make sure your manuscript conforms to that layout. So typically they will give you Word templates with tags. The Word documents end up looking nothing at all like the actual product would look.

The publishers I have dealt with have been in the IT field, and the entire process has been completely paperless until publication. All the writing and editing was done in Word. The final proof was a PDF (that was camera ready) where I had to note incorrectly placed figures and all that. But nothing left Word format until the final proof which was PDF.

"In *my* experience WYSIWYG word processors are really bad for formatting books. It is hard to get the layout consistent and tidy. Besides that the WYSIWYG interrupts writing and editing, since it is pretty distractive."

No publisher I have ever worked with wants you to do your own formatting. They have templates with special tags they want you to use for various level headings, figures, etc. The Word document is not at all WYSIWYG and looks nothing at all like what the final product will look like.Edited 2005-12-21 04:25 Wed, 21 Dec 2005 04:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Simba) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76545 http://osnews.com/thread?76545 That hasn't been my experience at all. Because typically PDF files are not editable. And I have actuallyy never worked with a publisher who wanted camera ready copies. In fact, most of them specifically say they *do not* want camera ready files. They have their own layouts that are common for their imprint ect, and they have people whos job it is to make sure your manuscript conforms to that layout.

Interesting! Maybe this differs per country or field of science. Maybe the books you submitted were part of a series with a uniform layout? At any rate, the change that we have noticed is that publishers have started to offload more and more over time. Editing and making the layout is not done by them anymore, they basically print it, and that's all. For them, it gives a wider margin. And no, these are not cheap publishers, but established and well-known academic publishers.

Then again. Most good UNIX books were typesetted by the authors, and submited as a camera-ready copy.

No publisher I have ever worked with wants you to do your own formatting. They have templates with special tags they want you to use for various level headings, figures, etc. The Word document is not at all WYSIWYG and looks nothing at all like what the final product will look like.

I have no experience with such templates. Wed, 21 Dec 2005 07:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (danieldk) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76548 http://osnews.com/thread?76548 Very true. Sometimes Word 2003 even "forgets" the structure in the document, and I have to restart Word to fix it. Wed, 21 Dec 2005 08:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (evert) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76573 http://osnews.com/thread?76573 Just a note for latex/lyx users.
There is a good program called latex2rtf,
which you can use for handing over latex
documents to word users. It's a shame
that this is a one-way process though Wed, 21 Dec 2005 09:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76574 http://osnews.com/thread?76574 Actually I'm a liberal arts writer and I use Latex. Admitedly I started with LyX on Linux, but changed to LaTeX, with TexShop as the editor,when I switched to OS X.

The most likely reason the writer did not include LaTeX, is that LaTeX is a mark-up language, not an editor. The usefulness of LaTeX to an author will be affected by the editor they use and it is therefore more appropriate to review available editors.

TexShop is good, but not available on Linux. There is a Qt based editor I tried on OS X, which is also good and I presume available for Linux (can't remember write now). It had good structure layout and included tabs, which is handy for editing multiple chapters at a time (each chapter a different document). Wed, 21 Dec 2005 09:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76578 http://osnews.com/thread?76578 Where is AbiWord? With it you get .doc compatibility plus a familiar interface (like MS Word). In my always humble opinion, it is better than Kate, although I do like them both. I appreciate your article. Thanks. Wed, 21 Dec 2005 10:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76581 http://osnews.com/thread?76581 I must second that.... used in on solaris and have found nothing that comes even close

I currently use texmacs to write all my papers Wed, 21 Dec 2005 10:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76593 http://osnews.com/thread?76593 The problem with an Emacs/LaTeX setup is actually mostly getting it set up well, with working LaTeX, AUCTeX, RefTeX. Once it is well-configured, most people get along reasonably with it, even from a non-technical background. Hand them some printed intro into LaTeX. Sure, you'll be surprised at some of the mistakes they'll make, but you'll also be surprised at their ability to dig themselves out of holes again.

I'd much sooner do phone support for such a setup than for any word processor: the good thing about this is that all the information is on-screen. "I did nothing different" is the _standard_ phone support cry, and since you always have the source file on-screen, there is always a way to pinpoint what happened. You can give sensible advice seeing screenshots, you can get sent sensible extracts, and so on.

And you don't need to worry about what buttons to press: when in doubt, you can always just type in LaTeX commands letter by letter. This is faster than trying to navigate by phone through half a dozen menus.

Emacs does not have much of a learning curve before you can use it nowadays. You'll never get to the state where you think you know it inside out, but that does not keep it from being workable. Wed, 21 Dec 2005 11:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76603 http://osnews.com/thread?76603 Current versions of AUCTeX, the prevalent LaTeX mode for Emacs, can fold footnotes using either a source-based folding approach or by using preview-latex (which typesets the footnote marker as an image and places that in the source text).

In addition, footnote and other macros get auto-wrapped on entry or reformatting in a manner setting them off nicely when reading the source. Wed, 21 Dec 2005 12:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76614 http://osnews.com/thread?76614 anyone out there got experience of moving from WYSISWYG to DocBook ?

I am thinking of moving a team of software developers away from Word but nobody wants to invest much time learning new tools.

I am convinced that DocBook is a better format (can track changes via source-control, generate multiple output formats etc.) but my boss thinks we haven't
yet reached the critical mass (since nobody spends more than 3 hours a week wrestling with the WYSISWYG word processor).

thanks,
Richard Wed, 21 Dec 2005 13:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76620 http://osnews.com/thread?76620 DocBook quite good for technical documents in the domain of software. It has many elements specific to this domain, for instance 'command', 'screen' and 'programlisting'. Since it is plain SGML or XML, it can easily be edited by many XML editors or text editors.

The primary thing that I do not like about DocBook is print output. There are basically two ways to go: making JadeTeX output with jade and the DSSSL stylesheets. You can then use the JadeTeX TeX macros create print output in various format. The layout is consistent, but often requires manual editing before it is printed. Being able to edit Postscript directly is very handy in this proces.

The other route is to use the DocBook/XSL stylesheet to generate XSL-FO output. XSL-FO can be converted to various output formats. The last time I tried this, the print output was really suboptimal, with a lot of characters that dissapeared, etc.

Other than that the DSSSL and XSL stylesheets for (X)HTML work very well, and the output can easily be customized. Wed, 21 Dec 2005 14:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (danieldk) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76621 http://osnews.com/thread?76621 That probably means that the people who wrote those articles either didn't know LaTeX very well or that they chose to have their figures in the end of the document.

That's a very cool way to say that these people where completely ignorant and stupid. The first thing you learn in working with images in LaTeX is how to place them, as it's included as an option in the command that allow that.

I don't know what typesetting/word processing software you use, but I generally recognize articles written in MS Word by their poor typesetting, especially when it comes to equations.

Don't have to go as far as equations. For any document, just look at text layout. You will see that it looks like crap on every Word document, because, depending on your alignment style, every line has some big spaces or ends of lines are too short or too long.
That's one of the reason LaTeX looks immediately more professionnal, it uses things like hyphenation. A good hint to recognise a LaTeX document is that you will find hyphens, but not in a Word document. Wed, 21 Dec 2005 14:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Ookaze) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76625 http://osnews.com/thread?76625 People always bitch that WYSIWG is bad because you are formatting as you write, but goddamnit! you can't get a good sense of where your writing's at if you don't have a decent visual feedback.

BS. The "decent visual feedback" is the text, not the formatting

This is no different than working on a typewriter: you did formatting and content at the same time

No you were forced to. If a program can do it for you, and correctly as a matter of fact, it's way better.
Sorry to tell you that you could not easily edit your text on your typewriter.

Using latex is no different: you still put the italics and bold while you type

No you don't, so it's different. You do that when it pleases you, which may be as you type or not.

But instead of seeing bold{blahblah}, I'd rather see it properly formatted onscreen

Use a proper LaTeX editor then. There are some good ones even on Windows.

Footnotes in latex are in the middle of the text, so you need to read

No they're not. You put them that way, because you are stupid.
I put mine like this :
text text text text text text text text footnote{text text text}
text text text

This seems like being rocket science to you ...

Whereas having
text text text text text text (1) text text text text text
(1) text text text text
Is much more practical and easy to apprehend.


I disagree, especially when "text text text" spans so much space that your footnote is now on another page than its mark, so you can't read it right away when editing.
What you talk about is practical when viewing the document, and the fact is that with LaTeX, you can choose where you want to place your footnote, so it's a plus.

I wish for a real model/view writing system, a bit like LyX, where you can see approximate formatting, but keep a strong structure that you can abstract from the view. However, LyX has an ugly UI, and I'm not going to limit myself to MLA latex bib style.

LaTeX with a good editor provides that, and groups like GUTenberg provide big libraries of styles to their members, which may contain what you want. Some of it is also available on the Web.
When you are a member, of course, some of their guru can tell you where to find what you are searching for. Wed, 21 Dec 2005 14:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Ookaze) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76630 http://osnews.com/thread?76630 just simple, sexy yellow text

Do you have the yellow text fetish? Wed, 21 Dec 2005 14:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76645 http://osnews.com/thread?76645 ... to set it up:
- enable hyphenation in the language settings (why is it there, I don't know). It will allow better justified alignment, without those ugly big spaces. And no box overfull to be afraid of!
- clean up the styles. Only keep the handfull you need
- remove all physical formatting icons and add icons for the handfull of styles you use

It is not the perfect tool but it can actually handle large documents. Trimming down the styles and formatting allow to focus on content. Revisions is a great feature. Wed, 21 Dec 2005 15:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76646 http://osnews.com/thread?76646 " On linux, Kword is the closest I've come to Frame on linux."

Have you tried Scribus? Wed, 21 Dec 2005 15:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76650 http://osnews.com/thread?76650 " On linux, Kword is the closest I've come to Frame on linux."

Have you tried Scribus?

Which is noting like it at all, except you can make grate looking documents in both. Scribus is like Page Maker, not Frame Maker. The workflow is very different in those applications. Wed, 21 Dec 2005 16:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Morty) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76654 http://osnews.com/thread?76654 >What would be nice is a LaTeX editor like Kile with a >split window, one showing the raw LaTeX code, the >other showing a WYSWIG version of the same code - >interpreted and updated in real time, or, if that is >too much of a cpu hog, updated every few seconds.

Real Time Updates of LaTeX Documents will hardly ever work. Even on an up-t-odate computer a complete LaTeX run will take 100% CPU and 100% load on hard disk for severel seconds.

What emacs + auctex however do, is to do real time previewing for selected parts.

Matthias Wed, 21 Dec 2005 16:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76661 http://osnews.com/thread?76661 A fan of PuppyLinux has rolled his own NaNoWriMo edition of the pup, with a bunch of tools for writing.

It includes a wiki, which no one has mentioned here. Wed, 21 Dec 2005 17:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76666 http://osnews.com/thread?76666 I am surprised that one of the best book writing tools (IMHO) was not mentioned.

http://www.texmacs.org

Screenshots:
http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/screenshots.en.html Wed, 21 Dec 2005 18:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76689 http://osnews.com/thread?76689 "I am surprised that one of the best book writing tools (IMHO) was not mentioned."

Yes, its a good point. Its a nice package and a real alternative, and probably should have been included. Lyx got the focus because I got started with it first, and found it was well accepted. Wed, 21 Dec 2005 18:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (alcibiades) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76734 http://osnews.com/thread?76734 Oh yes.

I also have a whole collection of stuffed Tux penguins ... they touch me at night. Wed, 21 Dec 2005 19:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Tom K) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76778 http://osnews.com/thread?76778 "Maybe the books you submitted were part of a series with a uniform layout?"

Well, most common publishers (at least in IT) have specific formats for specific series. O'Reilly for example has a certain way they want headings to look for their animal books, and certain formatting conventions for tips, warnings, code listings, new terms, commands to be typed, etc. They also, of course, have certain icons that they use for tips, warnings, and so on. Their Developers Notebook series, and their Head First series, of course, have other stylistic conventions. If you saw a few inside pages from an O'Reilly book, and you didn;t know what series it was from, chances are you could guess just from the stylistic conventions without even knowing the title.

Part of what makes a Head Start book, a Head Start book, or an animal book an animal book, are those formatting, layout, and style conventions. So they generally don't want authors giving them camera ready art, or WYSIWYG documents.

Some of the layout and formatting would probably be almost impossible for authors to do unless they were desktop publishing experts. For example, people with thought bubbles coming out of their heads are common in the Head Start series. That kind of thing is not easily done in any of the tools mentioned. (And even for authors that do decide to do it on their own, it usually requires a fair amount of experience and skill to make this kind of thing look right, so the publishers will typically have their own design staff redraw them anyway).

Typically, in my expierence, writing IT books has been more like writing HTML the way we used to do it. We just use tags to say what we want, even in Word, without worrying about what it actually looks like. Example, [H1] for a level 1 heading [H2] for level two [Li] for list item, and so on. The Word templates often have macros that the publisher can then run to look for these tags and remove them, while converting the following text to the desired style and such. Wed, 21 Dec 2005 20:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Simba) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76810 http://osnews.com/thread?76810 "There is a Qt based editor I tried on OS X, which is also good and I presume available for Linux "

Can you remember what it was? Not texmacs presumably, which supports clone views but not I think tabbed views. The tabbed view aspect sounds very interesting. I have looked but haven't come on any obvious candidates Wed, 21 Dec 2005 21:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76815 http://osnews.com/thread?76815 That's a very cool way to say that these people where completely ignorant and stupid.

No, not at all. In fact, I sincerely doubt that any of them are ignorant or stupid. I still can't see any other way to explain the OP's gripe with LaTeX than I did, however.

It might be that they indeed favored having the figures in the back of the document. I personally don't like that, but some probably do. After all, the LaTeX figures do have an option for doing exactly that.

If that wasn't the case, why you you think that lack of proficiency with a software tool equate ignorance or stupidity? Maybe they had a lot of large figures, and weren't aware of the float package? In such a case, the figures will get pushed off to the end. (As I found to my dismay until I discovered the float package.)

Anyway, you shouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions about the intent of what people write. Wed, 21 Dec 2005 21:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (CrimsonScythe) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76960 http://osnews.com/thread?76960 Quote:

There are drawbacks to Lyx... For example, if you have picked a list format, then each paragraph will be a new list element.

This isn't quite so. When using a list style enter the following keystrokes:

Return (start a new list item)
S-M-Right (Layout / Increase Environment Depth)
M-p s (switch to standard paragraph style)

Terminate subsequent paragraphs with M-Return to stay in the nested environment

S-M-Left and switch back to your list style to start another item

It sounds complex but generates simple LaTeX. Thu, 22 Dec 2005 01:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?76997 http://osnews.com/thread?76997 I did som jumping between word, latex and docbook on a school assignemnt with three class mates completley new to anything but word.

They all thought that latex was neat and didn't mind working with it. This was a non-techincal document though, so nothing fancy.

Docbook just went way over their heads, and I didn't like all the trouble to get it to print either. vex for eclipse was a nice editor though.

With booth aproaches I forced them to use subversion to add changes. On each update the server would generate a pdf and publish it (and a generation log) to a webserver.

The nice thing with this is that I could handle anything they didn't understand. If there where errors in their latex I could just add another update to fix it for them. So the learning curve with latex was rather gentle. Thu, 22 Dec 2005 03:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (John Nilsson) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?77007 http://osnews.com/thread?77007 Once upon time, was FrameMaker. Its available on Windows and Solaris Sparc. It's hands down the best writing tool I ever used. On linux, Kword is the closest I've come to Frame on linux.

Also it used to be available (and perhaps still is, depending upon whom you ask) for AIX, HP-UX, and other UNIXes.

I believe that there was even a Linux version kicking around at one point.

Of course there was also a Mac version, but Adobe killed that off as part of it's apparent systematic destruction of FrameMaker. Now that it's no longer fully cross-platform across the three main platforms that big publishing houses need, it's not as viable a product anywhere.

I really get the impression that the Adobe folks just don't "get" the idea behind FrameMaker. Anyone wishing to write an open source app to create books would be well advised learning the ins and outs of Frame though to see how to do things properly. Thu, 22 Dec 2005 03:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?77080 http://osnews.com/thread?77080 I don't know anything about TexShop, but you might try Kile on Linux.It's a TeX/LaTeX editor with syntax highlighting, command completion, etc, etc.

-Gnobuddy Thu, 22 Dec 2005 08:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?77104 http://osnews.com/thread?77104 The LaTeX people seem to be living in some kind of fantasy world where there are only 256 code points.
Repeat after me: There is no such thing as "plaintext".
All text in a computer is binary, and programs need to know how to translate that binary into code points, and editors need to know how to translate code points to glyphs. It's copiously stupid to assume that a text file uses whatever the current user happen to have currently as his/her default encoding. Thu, 22 Dec 2005 10:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (msundman) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?77182 http://osnews.com/thread?77182 I would recommend looking at this tool. It takes a simple "mind map" layout of paragraphs. Inside each box is a title/heading and the content for the section under that heading goes in the text area of that box.

From there you can generate a document in tex, OO and other formats. It is still an early development tool but quite useful in its simplicity. Thu, 22 Dec 2005 14:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?77308 http://osnews.com/thread?77308 For my writings I use txt2tags (txt2tags.sf.net), emacs (with outline mode) and subversion to store all my files...

---
Stefano Spinucci Thu, 22 Dec 2005 20:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?79929 http://osnews.com/thread?79929 "...to get the most out of any of these tools, your author will need a good, large flat screen, 19 inch minimun (sic) ..."

I love these "at least" recommendations. When 14" screens were the most common size around and 17" screens were a real luxury, many people would recommend "at least" a 15-inch screen, although lots of people got (and still get) their jobs done in 14-inch screens.

Some time later, it was easy to find pundits saying that one needs "at least" a 17-inch screen to get anything done. As if.

Now we need 19-inch screens "minimun"... Although I write translation work with three programs running at the same time in a 17-inch screen and have no problem with that.

How long until we need "at least" the Times Square screen in our rooms to get anything done? Fri, 30 Dec 2005 14:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments