Scribus?
redalastor:
Quote from: Vordark on May 21, 2009, 06:31:09 AM
Lyx looks like paradigm-ware and, well, LaTeX is hideous.
Hideous are horrrible to work with or you don't like its output? If it's the former, that's the point of Lyx existing.
Vordark:
I want to thank everyone for the suggestions they've put out here. You've given me several programs to take a look at, which, if nothing else, gave me an idea of the options I have available. Alas, thus far it still looks like Scribus for my budget, which is firmly at $0.00 for now. To be honest, I have downloaded none of these packages at this point, but instead have watched YouTube videos, gone through the online documentation and browsed forums when they are available. That, plus the undying hope to have my previous (circa, oh, 1994 - 1998) DTP experience count for something in my project is leading me to the conclusion that Scribus is the best among a set of bad options.
I'm bookmarking this thread and once my project is further along I'll probably grab at least one or two of the more attractive suggestions to compare things to and who knows, maybe I'll end up writing a set of reviews. In the meantime, if any of you have even heard of some other free solutions I'm still dying to hear about them.
dauvis:
Quote from: redalastor on May 21, 2009, 10:07:11 AM
Quote from: Vordark on May 21, 2009, 06:31:09 AM
Lyx looks like paradigm-ware and, well, LaTeX is hideous.
Hideous are horrrible to work with or you don't like its output? If it's the former, that's the point of Lyx existing.
Not sure what Vordark was meaning but I'll be frank. Out of the box, the output from LaTeX is ugly. Most people do not have the time/ability to coddle to make it a good replacement for DTP. It does what it does very well which is why it has endured for so long. As a replacement for DTP, it is not the proper tool for that job.
Vordark:
I really don't want to add any fuel to a potential religious war (and please don't be offended by that remark) but I've used LaTeX for documentation back in my "There is but one editor and its name is emacs!" days and it served the purpose well. It was also a bitch to use and I ended up having to write some C to strip out the formatting so that other people could read the plain text. I like the figures, I like how I could define certain regions of text so they looked, at first glance, that they were supposed to be typed, but getting a file to look like something other than a Comp Sci 401 book was like pulling the teeth from a rabid jackal.
I looked at Lyx, didn't download it, but flipped through the docs I could find. I'm very certain that if I wanted to write technical documentation with it, it would be a thousand times more friendly that hacking LaTeX by hand. But I can't imagine laying out a book I would want to spend time with using it. I can't imagine ever loving the way the pages worked.
Yes, there are ways around this. Yes, I could probably change various options, play with this or that and get an acceptable result. But I just don't see that being nearly as easy and straightforward in Lyx that it would be in a program designed for DTP. It might totally be what works for you and if so, great! I really hope that in a few months, when I'm working on my publication that whatever piece of software I end up using works even half as good for me. But I can't see anything with a LaTeX core being the answer for what I want to do.
redalastor:
Quote from: Vordark on May 21, 2009, 03:31:55 PM
Yes, there are ways around this. Yes, I could probably change various options, play with this or that and get an acceptable result. But I just don't see that being nearly as easy and straightforward in Lyx that it would be in a program designed for DTP. It might totally be what works for you and if so, great! I really hope that in a few months, when I'm working on my publication that whatever piece of software I end up using works even half as good for me. But I can't see anything with a LaTeX core being the answer for what I want to do.
LaTeX and DTP seems to be two problematic extremes. On one hand, LaTeX's knowledge of the rules of typography and the "just layout everything for you" approach is great. On the other hand, the user-friendly flexibility of DTP apps is great.
My ideal medium to write a book would be a good markup language like reStructuredText and an automatic conversion into a layout I like. RST looks like this:
================
My Chapter Title
================
My section title
----------------
A paragraph
A quotation
Another paragraph
.. note::
This is one of those typical text in RPG books that goes inside a rectangle somewhere in the page
I like it because it's trivial to edit, it's very readable, can be stored in a VCS, and it can be automatically converted to html, rtf, latex and pdf (through latex). Maybe I'll work on turning that into a proper output (custom latex and scripting?) eventually but in any case, I don't want to put my text in a DTP until the text is done.
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