Scribus?
Vordark:
I'm hearing something here that I was somewhat afraid of. That Scribus, at least to some extent, is shit. My experience with PageMaker dates back to somewhere around 1995 (as jerry mentions) when I used it extensively to help publish a regular magazine (something like 32 pages, monthly).
So now I have a new question, it seems: What should I use? I'm hoping to be able to lay out a book between 200 and 250 pages with art, tables, the works. I want the book to look "professional". My first endeavor will likely be self-published through something like Create Space, but I don't want to be locked out of using a local, commercial printer.
What is an alternative to Scribus that has at least comparable page layout abilities and doesn't cost me practically a thousand dollars (read as inDesign or Quark)?
Eero Tuovinen:
People have been recommending Serif Page Plus for a couple of years as an affordable option, but I've never tried it myself. In truth, I'd feel a bit cold with a 250 page book and any program that didn't have all the automation modern DTP programs have. If I had to do it without the programs I'm familiar with, I'd either go with Scribus (and prepare myself emotionally to not bash the computer on a wall) or the interesting option of InDesign demo version - 30 days of full capability layout power, should be more than enough if you prepare your materials well beforehand. The only drawback of this plan is that you can't change your layout later without getting InDesign back somehow.
Also, I understand that Americans can get InDesign and/or Quark considerably cheaper if they buy a student licence. And then there's the option of buying an old version of the program second-hand - Any version of Quark past 4 should be more or less usable for making a book as long as you pay attention to the modern features the given version lacks.
Vordark:
If I make crazy amounts of money off my first product, I'll consider picking up Adobe's creative suite/whatever that has inDesign and Photoshop, but to be honest, the day I fork out a thousand bucks to lay out fucking text on a page with a few graphics is the day I freebase Drano and shuffle off this mortal coil.
redalastor:
May I suggest Lyx?
Lyx is not either a word processor (they insist that word processors do to your words what food processors do to food) or a desktop publishing application. It's a WYSIWYM app for Latex (more on Latex in a moment).
First, WYSIWYM is both very similar and very different from the WYSIWYG you are used to, it stands from What You See Is What you Mean. This means that when you are writing your text, you don't care, at all, about how it looks. You care about meaning. This is a chapter title so I pick "chapter" from the drop down, this is a quotation so I pick quotation, etc. 90% of the time, you are just using "standard" which is plain old paragraphs. You don't care about chapter or page numbering either. You don't have to write a table of content, just pick Insert TOC from the insert menu and in time, the TOC will be built where you put it.
So you care about your text. You care about the structure. You care about cross-reference (this line refers to that section) but not about tracking on which page cross-references land and you care about inserting tags for your index (as for the Table of Content, you just have to insert it at the end of the text and it will be built for you).
So... You have your book, you spent a minimum amount of time fiddling with it you just wrote the content which is what matters in the end. You want your book to look good. You just export it to PDF and your work will be processed by Latex. Latex is a very advanced typesetting system that knows better than you how to make your document look good. It has a pretty good idea where your pictures should go, it knows about kerning and spacing and margin and all the rules you have to follow to make a professional looking book. It also computes everything, all the numbering, making references land on the right pages, etc. Once it is done, your PDF opens in your default PDF viewer and it looks great.
If you aren't satisfied, you can always export it to rtf or plain text and open it in a word processor or desktop publishing app.
Vordark:
redalastor: I think I'm looking for a more "traditional" DTP package. Lyx looks like paradigm-ware and, well, LaTeX is hideous. Thank you though for pointing it out!
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