Re:Advice from an Editor and Writer (Score 2, Interesting)

I've written (and typeset) two technical books. Both had a lot of figures and source code (UNIX internals and Filesystem Internals). The first one was written in 1996 using Word for Windows - that was a painful experience. It was published by Addison Wesley who were quite happy to take a printed copy much to my surprise. Copyediting was done on a paper copy. They were happy for me to do the typesetting and very flexible. The second was published by John Wiley. They took PDF as the final typeset copy. Their publishing people were good to work with but it was more of a struggle for me to actually typeset the book. I used Framemaker on Windows which I was very disappointed with. Indexing was done by hand for both books and as someone has pointed already, was not that difficult. For my next book, I'm looking at using open source tools as much as possible. I've used LaTeX a lot but would not use if for book writing as getting fine control over the layout has been painful in my view. I've had to write macros by hand and found it more painful that debugging a UNIX kernel dump! Using open source tools gives me lots of flexibility. I can do the work on Linux or a Mac (which I used most of the time) using programs that work across both platforms (and Windows). I'm looking at Scribus for typesetting, vi for my general editing (use whatever text editor you're accustomed to!) and I'm still undecided about what to use to draw figures but something simple like OpenOffice draw will probably suffice - my biggest concern is having a tool that is easy to use, that I can reuse some of the figures several years from now (I will self publish this time) and are stored in an open format. I'll probably add simple text markup in vi and then use a filter to take the text into Scribus - it has good pluggin support. My experience tells me to spend as little time as possible in the final typesetting program which, as many have said, distracts from actual writing. My advice is that if you're dead set on typesetting the text, learn as you continue to write and do the typesetting towards the end if possible - just get going with the writing and let that be your main concern. Having said that, you're choice of tool to write is therefore important. Make sure headers, text and other elements have consistent styles and whatever tool you use to finally typeset, make sure that it has the means to recognize these elements and be able to work with them. So should you typeset or not? I think that comes down partly to a personal choice and partly who the publishing house is that you're working with. The first goal is to get the book printed. Secondly you need to determine how much control you want over the distribution and marketing of the book. Does it need to be in bookstores around the world or will amazon.com suffice? Profit margins for authors are very thin so bear this in mind. If you're thinking about self publishing, there are many resources available. I liked Dan Poynter's book (see http://www.parapublishing.com/sites/para/) and there is much more information on-line