

What software would you use to write this? - aitoehigie

I am about writing a book and i would like to know the best software to use, something that would enable me include images, graphs and figures and finally generate a PDF. Pls Microsoft Word is excluded.
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dragoncity
LaTeX is the 'best' way to go. If you on Linux try the Kile , a excellent gui
interface tool to LaTeX which does not impose any special structures onto your
project. You are still free to arrange you LaTeX files as you wish.

Get yourself a decent intro to LaTeX book, Lamport's is the 'standard' , but
other titles are very good as well.

LaTeX user guide and reference ( 2nd edition) : Leslie Lamport

LaTeX Notes, practical tips for preparing technical documents : J.Kenneth
Shultis

LaTeX for everybody : Jane Hahn

are all useful reference to have handy.

BTW: I've used Tex & LaTeX since 1989 across various platforms, and have
shifted all my projects without any 'conversion' problems because all LaTeX
files are plain text. Most , if not all, other document handling tools use
their own file formats.

Remember TeX is a document language so you have to write your text as plain
text and it is 'compiled' into you printed document, it is not like using Word
or OpenOffice. But once learnt Tex/LaTeX will prove useful forever !

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gnosis
I would second this recommendation. Learning enough LaTeX to typeset a whole
book effectively will take some doing, but the effort is well worth it.

Apart from dragoncity's recommendations, these are also good places to start:

[edit: rather than clog this thread with a ton of links, I've decided to put
them all in to a separate page which you can view here:
<http://paste.pocoo.org/show/159346/> ]

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RiderOfGiraffes
Reading the other comments and responding, much of TeX (I don't know LaTeX -
my Ph.D. was written in plain TeX) and HTML are interconvertable, depending on
what you're doing. It depends a lot on the kind of book you're writing,
whether you need equations, fancy layout, etc. If it were, say, a novel, I'd
still go for the wiki. Then put tags for the linear arc through the narrative,
and side pages for notes to yourself.

On the other hand, if it's a technical work then you might need something more
high-powered. My book was quite technical, but I still used a wiki and
embedded images from MimeTex for the equations. Exporting to HTML and using
htmldoc worked a treat.

I'm technical, I did a lot of support work, I didn't use a tool "out of the
box," but I could tweak it to do some unusual stuff.

YMWV. How much customisation are you willing to do?

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imurray
Academics from mathematical fields tend to use LaTeX. One way to compile a PDF
is with pdflatex, which can import .png, .jpg, and .pdf images. This means
you’d need to be able to get your vector images into .pdf format conveniently.
This tends to be easy on traditional Unixy systems. I believe on osx too(?).

Many theses and textbooks are typeset with LaTeX. I used it for my PhD thesis.
Advantages include: a plain text source file, which can be edited in your
favorite editor; easy cross-referencing that automatically updates; high-
quality typesetting. Some things that are very easy in Word are harder to do
in LaTeX: for example, it can be tricky to select fonts or customize other
aspects of a standard style file.

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CyberFonic
Yes, I use Latex on my Mac Book Pro (Snow Tiger). Works very well.

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imurray
I was really referring to the ease of making figures in the right format, as
the poster made a particular point about including figures.

When I used to use MikTeX on Windows (8 years ago now) saving figures to .eps
or .pdf from most applications was possible but a bit tricky. It often
involved printing to file with the right postscript driver [1], then fiddling
with bounding boxes and running through epstopdf. Most Unix graphics
applications produce postscript and/or pdf pretty easily. I _think_ osx with
its Qwartz stuff will too.

[1] e.g. Apple Color LW 12/660 PS with "optimized for portability" turned on.

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CyberFonic
If you find Latex too daunting, take a look at Lyx. It works more like a
WYSIWYG word proc without changing the Lyx/Latex concept of writing what you
mean.

One huge win with Latex is that if your publication is formatted to, say ACM
guidelines, and it gets rejected, it takes less than a day to convert to IEEE
transactions guidelines. With a WYSIWYG word proc, even with extensive use of
styles, it would take many days to achieve the same level of transformation.

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Nosnik
I think LaTeX, <http://www.latex-project.org/>, would be a good choice, been
using it for a bunch of papers for computer science. It is pretty easy to get
started with a simple template.

I can recommend MiKTeX as an editor for windows

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RiderOfGiraffes
Dreadfully low tech, but I would use a wiki, then export to a single HTML page
and use htmldoc. At least, that's what I did.

I look forward to seeing other people's answers.

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bkaran
Open Office. It gives you everything you may need while writing and also
option for exporting file to Pdf format. Main advantage its free(Open Source).

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imurray
Like Word, it probably isn’t the best tool for something book length. It’s
really designed for letters and short reports. It can be done; I know brave
souls who have written theses with Open Office. I just wouldn’t personally
give up the stability and neatness of working with plain-text source.

