[Gllug] Typesetting a book under Linux

[lesleyb at herlug.org.uk]

On Tue, Nov 04, 2008 at 11:53:13AM +0000, - Tethys wrote:
> What are the options? It's a text book, with a lot of full colour
> images, some requiring full bleed. Image positioning is variable, and
> text needs to flow around the images.
> 
> My instinctive feeling is that Scribus is the right answer, but after
> fighting with it for some time, I've basically given up. It's simply
> not ready yet, and has too many bugs to be usable. What else is there?
> LaTeX, obviously, but while I've successfully used it for other works
> of a similar length, I suspect it's really not the right tool for the
> job here, and I'd think that getting the image positioning right is
> going to be too painful. I thought that LyX might be able to ease the
> pain, but having played with it for a bit, it doesn't seem to.
> Inkscape does the layout just fine, but isn't really designed for
> multi-page documents, and with the best will in the world, it's text
> formatting abilities leave something to be desired.
> 
> So are there any others options I've missed? Are any of the Windows
> apps sufficiently well supported under Wine to be viable? I'd prefer a
> free software solution, but will settle for something that allows me
> to get it finished before the deadline...
> 


http://www.latex-project.org/guides/ might be a source of good guides to
LaTeX.  In particular
http://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/info/lshort/english/lshort.pdf
is a classic freebie intro.

I think LaTeX is worth the effort.  Scribus is really for laying out
flyers, posters and similar short-span documents and is more wrong for
the job than either OOWriter or MSWord.  

Regards

L.


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