Its a good article, but. But. BUT!
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Alcibiades Jan 29, 2006 2:00 AM EDT |
Yes, this is indeed what it takes to set yourself up for writing a book in a conventional fully featured word processor. Its an excellent article from that point of view. But my own reaction was, this is why I recommend using Lyx. Teaching the average author, at least the average novelist or essayist, how to do this stuff is really an uphill struggle. Its a bit like starting teaching carpentry by showing your student how to make his own planes and chisels. If instead you teach him how to use Lyx, it does all this stuff for him/her out of the box, and after an afternoon and a couple of phone calls, you can leave him/her to get on with it. What the article is really showing is how counterproductive it is to be obliged by the fully featured WP to think formatting and typesetting, when all you really want to do is tell the system that this part of the document is a new chapter, or a footnote or whatever. All authors have to know what logical bit of a document they are writing. But they do not have to, and should not have to, worry about what font or indentation it has, while they are writing it. WP is great for notes, newsletters, memos, letters, all that sort of stuff. But to use it for writing a book is like, another carpentry analogy, using a chisel to smooth surfaces down. It can be done, but its doing it the hard way. Get a plane! Please, get a plane! |
| tadelste Jan 29, 2006 7:55 AM EDT |
Alcibiades: I agree with you in theory but having written a few books I can promise you you'll never get by with Lyx. Publishers hand authors a template full of macros and a style sheet a mile long. The publisher's tools department wants the author to also be the typesetter. So, you have a number of stylistic skills to master. When I wrote my first book twenty years ago, I sent the publisher printed pages from my PC. They couldn't even handle floppy disks. Today, you send a digital file with formatting so strange that I doubt an average reader could decipher it. The publisher wants the graphics in tiff format. You can't send this stuff by email so you upload it to a ftp site. New writers who land a contract for a book better get ready for an active editor, deliverables, rapid turn around of top and copy edits and notes plus mastery of a word processor like Openoffice writer. That's the reality. If you want to teach a class in grammar or introduce someone to Strunk and White and the Chicago Manual of Style you aren't doing them any favors by having them avoid getting up to speed on the word processor. |
| mvermeer Jan 29, 2006 10:40 AM EDT |
Tom: there is such a thing as self-publishing, or self-typesetting. If you're a non-mediocre author, you do have a choice. My reaction to the article was pretty much that of Alcibiades. An astronomer colleague of mine wrote a popular textbook on GPS -- using MS Word. Now he's working on the second edition, and though he had the option of MS Word and OOo Writer, he chose LyX + LaTeX and doesn't regret it, though it means quite a lot of re-doing. Some experiences just aren't worth repeating... anecdotical, but there you have it. Of course the decision was helped by this being a moderately math-rich subject matter. |
| tadelste Jan 29, 2006 11:32 AM EDT |
Martin, I do understand. Back in 1990-92, I wrote for a publisher who wanted camera ready copy. So, I used Aldus Pagemaker. I really loved waiting for those fonts to load ;). If one has a publisher today, they will either write in OOo or the "W" word. Oops. For self publishing, I think lyx is a nice tool. I hope this isn't viewed as an argument. Instead, I hope our readers will see these comments as information. It might also be useful for people unfamiliar with LyX to visit their site http://www.lyx.org/. |
| mvermeer Jan 29, 2006 10:28 PM EDT |
Another useful link for self-publishing: http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/lyx/ Nowadays the option of self-publishing is much more realistic than it used to be. Or self-typesetting. Many publishers are flexible esp. in science (what I am familiar with). |
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