Publishing programs
- Thread starter Leslie
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I use InDesign but it is too pricey for a one off; more for someone starting out with many projects to go. And a pretty steep learning curve. I'm not sure an easy solution unless you know someone who knows a program and will put it together for you. I'd offer but I am max'd out for years to come on my own projects. Chris
The book is long; is that what you meant? Or did you mean if it won't take me long to catch on to how it's done. I'm rather technologically challenged and not the most patient person in the world. Might there be a free trial form of the program to download? My problem is also that trying to pay for something from here is a nightmare. It's insanity to upload a credit card number.
Are there a lot of charts and images and structural text (tables) or is it straight text? If this is the recipe book, that would be a challenge even for a pro.
Ask Mr. Religion
Flatly Unflappable
If the MS is ready it seems a product more ready to pour that into is needed than something more geared toward the writing process. That's what Scrivener looked more geared toward from the opening graphics I saw. 
There are a lot of charts and images and structural text, summary boxes set off to one side and the like. It's unavoidable.
littlepeople
Puritan Board Freshman
indesign can be had for $20 a month, and I would highly recommend that.
Buying guide | Adobe InDesign CC
Buying guide | Adobe InDesign CC
Tirian
Puritan Board Sophomore
Out of interest what is MS Office not doing for you? It's pretty powerful and although I would lean toward InDesign for large projects I have published very complex technical user manuals for software etc using Office. Ms Word to be precise. (I find Publisher is only good for very small projects)
Logan
Puritan Board Graduate
Ah, well that does complicate it.
LaTeX is open-source (free) and it's output is arguably the best for just plain text, but it has a steep learning curve (it's a markup language, basically programming). If it is something more complicated then it would take considerably more work. Attached are two samples of what I've done before. If it is something like this then I'd be happy to share the "code". But I suspect it's more complicated than you'd want for one project.
Additionally, I don't think anyone has mentioned Scribus. I looked into it briefly a long time ago but have had no experience with it. I understand that it is something of a open-source version of InDesign. From the looks of it, you'll be able to manually drag things around and put them where you want, which might, or might not be what you want for a complex project.
Scribus.net
Also, there is a huge amount of thought and intention that goes into typesetting and I wonder if you are familiar with it? An excellent book is "The Art of Typographical Style" by Robert Bringhurst. He goes over everything from the choice of fonts, to the ratio of the inner-to-outer margins, when to indent, leading between lines, historical textblock sizes etc. But I warn you: you'll never look at a book the same again!
Matt: I have people ask me "what's wrong with Word?" quite often. MS Word is useful in that anyone can quickly come up with something, but it is far, far more difficult to make it look professional. It is, in essence, a digital typewriter. This might not be immediately obvious if you've never looked into it. Our company uses Word for "publishing" internal documents, operator manuals, and that sort of thing but even there it has significant shortcomings. It's quick, dirty, and ugly. It gets the job done and you have access to the information you need but it is not professional. I have no idea about Publisher, having never used it.
If you don't know what "ligatures" or "kerning" mean, then you've probably never noticed but it irks me that the MS Word document is becoming the standard, so much so that a really professionally typeset document "looks weird" to a lot of people!
It's a year commitment at $20 per month; for $30 you can sign up month to month and cancel any time. But with the charts and things this would be a very difficult task for someone unfamiliar with InDesign.
Ask Mr. Religion
Flatly Unflappable
The individual files (chapters and sections of some long encyclopedic material) look fine. Try to put them together, though, and MS Word changes the fonts erratically, starts renumbering the pages at the beginning in the middle of a long file, puts in weird column and page breaks. The page numbers in the index do not correspond to where the index entry is in the text. They are all one page off. When I convert Word to pdf, the individual pdf files look fine, but I can't string them together. I need to string the whole business together, create tables of contents for the two volumes, merge the tables of contents for the two, and index the whole business.
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