Publishing software
 

I have a friend that is writing a book. She asked me about the software she should use. Any suggetions? She has MS Word, is that sufficient? She was told by one person to use Quark Express. ???

thanks

QuarkXPress is an industry standard in publishing. It is here, at least. I know most book publishers use it, and I know of newspapers using it. I use it. It's powerful. You can do pretty much anything with it. There might be a steep learning curve depending on what you want to do. (ie. Does the book have charts and illustrations or other complex design elements?)

If your friend isn't going to be the one publishing the book, all she needs is MS Word.

Word is a writer's tool. Quark is a layout tool. Which is she doing?

Since you didn't say "I have a friend that is laying out a book", I conclude that Word is the appropriate tool for her.

I prepared a photo-ready copy of a biostatistics textbook entirely using MS Word and MathType. It's very possible.

She has written the book in Word. She's a consultant and will self publish. So she is both the writer as well as the publisher. I've emailed her to ask if she has found a company to print the book. I'm sure they would have a format that would be preferred and asked her to find out.

A mutual friend suggested to her that I might know something about this. At least I know where to go for the answers. :D

Most publishing companies will allow you to print and send them a "photo-ready" copy of your book for editing and then publishing. We did ours in MS Word; if she has graphics or something else, they may recommend a program to her.

The company will also send her guidelines for preparing her photo-ready copy of the book. They are VERY specific, including page setup dimensions, font faces, sizes, spacing, whether to bold figure/table titles, where to place those titles, how to format text boxes, how to format equations, etc. etc. As soon as she decides on a company, she should ask for those guidelines.

Hmm, I'm working for consultants.. wonder if I could convince them to publish a book. ;) A software consultant at the barn, and program management consultants at work.

QuarkXPress is a fucking abomination. I hate it with all that I am. Adobe InDesign makes so many things so much easier.

InDesign is likely easier to use, but realize that QuarkXPress is employed by many of those coming out of the mechanical age of publishing.

I would only recommend QuarkXPress if you are going to use it a lot. I think printers can accept PDFs for printing. So, realistically, one could use a Word document converted to PDF and bypass publishing software altogether.

I can't wait for the day it is phased out of use.

Why, are you forced to use it?

It is mandatory for many because all their files were made in Quark and it would be a bitch to redesign everything in InDesign.

I have worked with some good free "document to PDF" tools. I am always on the look out for good free material and keep an up-to-date list (my list linked here) in the TFP Open Source/Freeware Thread (visit thread).

Yes, you can get pdfs from Word, but are you going to get pdfs that look good? You do not want to lay out a book in Word. It really isn't designed for that.

Being an old school unix guy, i'm a fan of TeX and LaTeX. These are markup languages used for making pretty printer output. Tex and LaTeX can output pdf, postscript and what's more .tex files are simply text files with some markup thrown in. No gratuitous file format incompatibilities. Both TeX and LaTeX are free software.