[PLUG] A personal milestone

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 11 May 2009 10:26:50 -0700
Tim Wescott <tim at wescottdesign.com> dijo:

> My one published book was done using OpenOffice, also, then sent off to 
> my publisher who used $$ tools to finish the book.  I did my Master's 
> thesis using LaTeX.
> 
> I'm still trying to decide if the versatility and math typesetting 
> capability of LaTeX is better than the WYSIWYG capability of OOo...
> 
> Did you consider using LaTeX, and if so why did you choose OOo instead?

This book was a real saga.

My first book was done in WordPerfect/DOS. I remember spending hours
and reams of paper printing out each page over and over until I finally
got things positioned properly.

Then I went to QuarkXPress, then PageMaker, briefly to Ventura, and
then to InDesign. I have InDesign CS installed on Windows 2000 in
Virtualbox. Truth be told, I could have done this job in a small
fraction of the time it took if I had done it in InDesign. But this is
my first book since moving to Linux four years ago. I was determined to
do it the FOSS way.

When I first started writing and designing books the term "content" had
not yet entered the lexicon. Somewhere in the 90s I think it became
fashionable to think of content as separate from design. I think it was
the web that brought this about. Whatever, the idea is alien to me. The
design expresses what I am trying to say as much as the words. Bear in
mind that all my books are textbooks and workbooks. Not only are there
lots of graphics, there are no two pages that look alike. 

So when I started this book I decided to do it in OOo. I have been
using OOo as my only word processor for ten years, long before going to
Linux. I knew it had the layout power of WordPerfect, plus a GUI. I
wrote the whole thing and designed it as I went along. But by the time
I got to the end I was severely frustrated by the bugs. This is the
first book I have done that needs formulas (really just scalable
brackets), and the Math module in OOo has so many bugs that it took
forever to work around all the problems. Plus it was dropping
characters in the printout - just a general mess. Some may recall my
asking here for help trying to determine if it was Gnome or Ubuntu or
OOo, and if I might be able to eliminate the problems by going to an
older version on a different platform. Eventually I concluded that OOo
just had to go. It's great for writing ordinary text, but if you need
its less commonly used features it will probably mess up your work. I'd
certainly advise staying clear of its Math module.

That led me to a quest for something  better. Rich and others here
convinced me to try Lyx. Several times in the past I had tried LaTex
and other parts of the family, but never Lyx. I spent three solid 12
hour days in front of the computer trying to figure it out. I'm sure
the job could have been done in Lyx, and perhaps someone who knows Lyx
well could have done it reasonably quickly. But in the end I just
concluded that Lyx and I do not think the same way. 

That left Scribus as my next best alternative. I had already used
Scribus several times in the past for small jobs, so I knew something
about it. The part that I love most is that it is a page layout app. A
big frustration while working in OOo is that it is continuous text. I
could never tell what page I was working on. Or I'd place a graphic and
suddenly it would pop to the next page. I was always using Ctrl-Enter
to force a new page. Scribus (like InDesign, PageMaker and QuarkXPress)
is page oriented. When you start a new document you tell the program
how many pages it is going to be. Each page is a separate entity. If
you place something on a page and it doesn't fit, it still stays where
you put it so you can resize it or move it as necessary. It may slop
off the page onto the pasteboard, but it stays where you put it. Think
of it as an electronic version of a light table and hot wax. This is
how my brain works when laying out a book.

However, much as I love working in Scribus, it has problems. I used a
bleeding edge version - 1.3.5svn, which is not recommended for
production work because it is not yet a stable release. But the stable
version is so old that it lacks too many features that I need. Even
1.3.5 lacks a lot - no tables, for example. So I spent a lot of time
figuring out how to work around the missing pieces. As it turns out,
most of the missing pieces are available in OOo. And Scribus can import
PS, EPS and SVGs as editable vector graphics. So if I needed a table I
did it in OOo, printed the selection to file, and placed it as a
graphic in Scribus. Sometimes OOo would mess up printing to PS and I'd
discover that I could get correct output by printing to CUPS-PDF or
exporting from OOo as PDF. Scribus can place a PDF, but rasterizes it
in the process. But then I discovered that Inkscape does a great job of
importing PDFs and maintaining them as editable vector images. Just
about every page needed some kind of legerdemain to get what I wanted.
But in the end things look a lot better. And not once did I have to
print out a page to see what it would look like. When I finished I made
a printout and I only needed to tweak a couple things.

Having said all of that, if your work needs a lot of serious formulas,
and if you know LaTex, that is probably your best bet. Scribus can
render LaTex formulas (you just type the code into a popup window), but
it does so as bitmaps. If you use enough resolution you can probably
get decent looking formulas, but I found it difficult. And Scribus can
use only Times or Arial when it renders LaTex formulas. You could write
the formulas in LaTex, print to PS, and then place as vector images
into Scribus, though. As for formulas in OOo, I wouldn't wish that
screaming mess on my worst enemy.

That's probably way more than you wanted to read. :(