Software for writing a book

axer

Hi y'all,

A friend of mine is just begining to write a 400 or so page book about his parish and through personal experience I know MS Word is not the best software to write it in or lay it out. Anyone know what is the best software for doing this?

Thanks for any advice,
Noel.

themole

Latex is good for books and the like,

there is a fairly steep learning curve, but once you get it to work it has good features, especially if you can find a style file for a book

Tobias Greeshman

Yeah Latex is the best way to go. There's a port of it for windows I believe, it can be quite a pain to learn though but it's very effective once you get used to it.

You generally write each of your chapters in a different source file and latex will compile each chapter into a pdf (or whatever output you tell it to) for you.

Tom Dunne

TBH, Word is about the most "user friendly" piece of software you can get for writing a book. I use the term "user friendly" quite lightly.

How familiar is your friend with advanced features such as indexing and referencing? It is incredibly easy to create a table of contents and an index in Word. Also, if the book will have pictures, there are some pretty decent formatting features in the bloatware.

I haven't written a book (yet), but I do teach advanced Word, so I would be fairly familiar with what it can and can't do.

Just don't try using Open Office.

(Am I sounding like a Microsoft Evangalist? If so, I apologise. I am anything but)

axer

I am just thinking of the laying out of the book afterwards as I'd say there will be alot of images in the book. Do you think word would cause problems later on when trying to layout the book?

aidan_walsh

Is the book up for publication? Because if it is, it doesn't matter what its written in, the publisher will be doing their own work on it anyway.

Lump

Quark is the industry Desk top publishing. However, typing in work is fine if it's for publication as publishers will do their own work. Also, if you type in work, it's easy to import to Quark.

John

Tom Dunne

axer wrote:

Do you think word would cause problems later on when trying to layout the book?

I don't think so - Word has plenty of word-wrap features. Besides, how many books are written with every single picture ready as it is being written? I would say a large percentage of pictures are inserted after the text has been written.

niallb

There's a front end for Latex called LyX which might look more familiar. I know two people who've used it for large projects and they felt it saved them huge aounts of time and distraction.
There's a bootable CD called Ghostwriter which will simply let you start writing without installing anything on your disk.
Worth a try.

NiallB