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: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.
Member since: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.
Member since:> 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
Member since:"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.
Member since: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).
Member since:"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
Member since:
2005-07-05
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.