Scribus?

[David Artman]

A couple other freeware publishing apps:
Kile - Yet Another LaTex Editor, but quite full-featured for all that.
Open Office - Good for both structured documentation AND doing manual layout. If you find Scribus's page-layout paradigm too klunky for a large book, go with OO. Not a bad drawing app in it, either (for charts, graphs, flowcharts, etc).

[Selene Tan]

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:

(snip)

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.

I seem to remember that when Clinton wrote The Shadow of Yesterday in reStructuredText, exported it as HTML, and imported it into OpenOffice Writer to do layout. OO Writer kept his styles intact so he was able to do the initial layout with the headings, etc. in place. He wound up switching to Scribus later, and picked it partly because it could read his OO Writer files.

Here's an article about Clinton's process.

[Vordark]

I've used Open Office extensively and finally gave up on it.  I bought MS Word and Excel a few months ago and have been using them ever since.

Is it possible/not-hair-pulling to layout a full book that looks nice using Word?  My understanding (from back in the day) is that trying to make a word processor do DTP type things is like chewing razor blades.  Has this changed?

[greyorm]

Has this changed?

It has improved. Today it is more like trying to chew dull razorblades.

[redalastor]

Is it possible/not-hair-pulling to layout a full book that looks nice using Word?  My understanding (from back in the day) is that trying to make a word processor do DTP type things is like chewing razor blades.  Has this changed?

If you want a Word Processor that does not suck at layout, you have to look at WordPerfect.

There's a free trial (one month, full functionality) available at Corel's website: http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/ca/en/Product/1207676528492#tabview=tab0

[reason]

I've found Scribus sane, useful, and good for getting the job done. BUT, you really have to go with the 1.3.5svn branch at the time of writing here. The 1.3.3 stable branch is terrible in comparison.

[Clay]

I haven't ever tried to lay out anything of size in Scribus.  It's really good for character sheets and one or two page items.  I don't think that I would like trying to lay out something like a GURPS or World of Darkness book using the package.

If you need automation of any kind though, Scribus is going to be hard to beat.  When I interviewed Clinton for that Linux Journal article, he mentioned that without the ability to use Python to automate things he never could have used it to lay out The Shadow of Yesterday.