Desktop publishing packages?

Cliffjumper · Post by **Cliffjumper** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 8:51 pm

Anyone recommend any? I'm thinking of writing a non-fictional book with a view to putting it on Lulu and wouldn't mind having a few more options to fiddle with in terms of formatting and graphics.

Post by **Denyer** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 9:15 pm

Word's not bad if you use it more smartly than people who just click around on toolbars until it does what they think they want -- i.e. break the content down into styles, sections, etc. and (2007 onwards) for pre-press output publish directly to PDF rather than introducing third-party virtual printer drivers. Provided images are appropriately masked it can also wrap text around them pretty well.

http://daiya.mvps.org/bookword.htm looks alright [as an intro] from a quick squizz.

Protip; get the content sorted before starting on layouts.

edit:

http://www.serif.com/desktop-publishing-software/ may be worth a look.

Cliffjumper · Post by **Cliffjumper** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 9:19 pm

Mmm, I've been using OpenOffice... I've got text for something that's going to be very similar sorted for mucking around with but I'm kind-of reticent to write and format too much before I know whether it's going to actually work; if it doesn't it can be reworked for the site but it'd feel like doing the same work twice what with the different formatting needed. Cheers for the links, will check out tomorrow

Post by **Denyer** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 9:50 pm

Open source wise, http://www.scribus.net/canvas/Scribus is the OO equivalent for DTP.

Cliffjumper · Post by **Cliffjumper** » Sun Aug 05, 2012 9:50 pm

Had a bit of a fiddle with Scribus... Pretty useful for free, ta - think I might stick with OpenOffice for this one, though, now I've worked out how to get images to stretch across multiple columns. It's just tables that are proving a bugger, but I might just separate them onto different pages... Do Text Section 1 then the applicable table as a separate doc and stitch them together in Acrobat - or even just on Lulu now I think about it.

Thanks