Linked by Alcibiades on Tue 20th Dec 2005 18:40 UTC
In order to see what is needed in book writing applications, you need
to look carefully at the desk of someone who is actively writing a
book. You will most likely see piles of paper, often cut up and marked
with pencil, and if you examine those of the papers that are in piles,
you will see that the pagination is all over the place because pages
have been reordered. Read on...
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Member since:
2005-10-08
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