Word processor for a book

On or about 1/3/06 12:43 PM, thus spake "Brett Walker" <walkerblmail.com>:
> This was using Word X, not 2004, so maybe the latest
> version is better. But it was not a fun experience.
>
> Can anyone recommend an alternative?

Adobe FrameMaker remains the only program I'd consider for writing a book at
this point. :) m.

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On 1/3/06 6:34 PM, "Matt Neuburg" <matttidbits.com> wrote:

> On or about 1/3/06 12:43 PM, thus spake "Brett Walker" <walkerblmail.com>:
>> This was using Word X, not 2004, so maybe the latest
>> version is better. But it was not a fun experience.
>>
>> Can anyone recommend an alternative?
>
> Adobe FrameMaker remains the only program I'd consider for writing a book at
> this point. :) m.

But, Matt, there's no currently supported FrameMaker for the Mac OS. Does
that mean that you'd write it in another platform?

Best,

Stephen

>On or about 1/3/06 12:43 PM, thus spake "Brett Walker" <walkerblmail.com>:
>> This was using Word X, not 2004, so maybe the latest
>> version is better. But it was not a fun experience.
>>
>> Can anyone recommend an alternative?
>
>Adobe FrameMaker remains the only program I'd consider for writing a book at
>this point. :) m.

"Notabene" (www.notabene.com) is a word processor specifically
designed for wordsmiths.... folks that do research and write/publish
books. Indeed, it may be the only one of its kind. Of course you'll
have to run it under VirtualPC. Chances are that it will run under
WINE once Mac moves to Intel processors. In any case, it is an
absolutely awesome program, but with a steep learning curve and
devoted (fanatic) users.

H.

I have used Word (back to 5.0), Nisus Writer Classic, and now on OS X, Mellel and Word 2004. Both have behaved reasonably well (210 page book).

However, recently I have experimented with Papyrus (http://www.rom-logicware.com/), and it is a high-end word processor with indexing capability (as well as layout capability). I find it to be solid, fast, and stable. (~$100 US)

So also with RagTime, although it has the feel of page layout.

I'll put in my $0.02 for NeoOffice--the Mac-like version of OpenOffice.

It supports indexing, table of contents, and master documents (plus
much more). From my experience with a 130 page book, and what I've
read, it beats Word for reliability.

Some learning curve, as some functions aren't as intuitive as they
could be, and it has the look of a port rather than native app. Of
course you can't beat the price* of open source software ;-)

<http://www.neooffice.org/>. I recommend the 1.2 beta version.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeoOffice>

Once it gets to 2.0 (this year), users will have full support of the
OpenDocument format--which has a promising future as a vendor-
independent, standardised, and documented, method of storing documents.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument>

Cheers

*Having said that, I've made donations to both OpenOffice and NeoOffice.

I was intrigued by the mention of Nota Bene. After I looked through the web site, I found that it is exactly what I need (for Biblical studies and theological papers). I sent an email to Note Bene and here is the response I received: ==========================================

"We are hoping that we will be able to get Nota Bene running on the new Macs that are due out later this year with an Intel processor. No promises, but we are hopeful! We certainly agree that there is a large academic community of Mac users.that would be interested in NB if it worked on a Mac.

Thanks for your interest.

Anne

Anne Putnam Nota Bene Associates, Inc. www.notabene.com "

================================

So, maybe Mac users need to petition en masse the company. :-)

This is a partial echo of Adam's comments in the original message.

Regenerating dynamic elements like indices before you've finished writing seems unnecessary. If you can separate the content editing from these more technical aspects, things might become a little easier. Since you have several people involved, how about an online collaborative environment like Writely or a wiki, or just plain text (or RTF, or Word if you prefer) attachments of individual chapters or sections sent by email, until the content is pretty much set in stone?

If it's essential for multiple people to work on the index, including its formatting, and there isn't a professional indexer as Adam suggests is usual, and if Word isn't good enough, then it sounds like you're going to have to buy multiple copies of InDesign or Quark XPress. But are you sure this is the case? Perhaps the index content could be worked on by multiple people using plain text, and one of you could then format it alone using one of these relatively expensive applications?

A quick question: Is Word the only program with revision tracking and comments?

My recommendation would be LyX. A very robust, quasi-WYSIWYG TeX/
LaTeX based document processing system. Information can be found at:

www.lyx.org

Like anything TeX/LaTeX based, it does have a bit of a learning
curve, but well worth it. There is also a nice Wiki based how-to,
and a very active user-list, so most questions get answered very
quickly.

Bibliography generation is handled using Bibtex so, any bibliography
management program capable of generating Bibtex files would work just
fine.

Index generation is a bit of a chore---mostly a manual tag insertion
process, with the final output being produced by makeindex. But as
Adam has already noted, most professional books do not use the
automatic indexing software and with good reason, but rather rely on
professional indexers (or in the academic world a couple of research
assistants).

All TeX related processing (like generating TOCs, lists of figures,
or running bibtex or makeindex) is handled by LyX so it is generally
transparent to the user. And since this is TeX/LaTeX based, for some
tasks (like technical writing involving tables, figures and
equations) there is no equal, and the output is absolutely beautiful
(though if the document is going to get handed off to a publisher,
this might not matter).

The original poster noted that much work had already been done in
word. There are converters that will take Word or RTF and convert it
to LyX via LaTeX. (Most things like text formatting, tables,
equations and figures will make the translation okay.)

My 2 cents.

Tomoharu Nishino

[I think we've done this topic before, including voices for TeX tools and bemoaning the loss of FrameMaker. Do we have anything new in the market? -Andrew ]

(Readers with aversion to pedantry should probably skip this message.)

Is Word a word processor? WordPerfect is. But try setting your text in 11/13 point in Word. If there is any way of controlling leading I haven't found it. Does Word space proportionately? – that is, what do you get if you enter multiple spaces?)

Perhaps we should use the term *typesetter* for an application that, well, makes pages. Which reminds me that you can always use InDesign.

Sadly for some, Word's worst feature is not its limitations, but rather that it is a pain in the ass.

I'd put in a vote for LaTeX as well (whether edited by LyX, or by
manual markup in a different editor. It's not for everyone, but
there's no performance problems with large (or insanely large)
documents, unlike Word.

One of its strengths is its mathematical typesetting, but of course,
you may not need to do this. Owing to its use of \ and special
characters like &, typesetting program code can be somewhat
problematic. However, it's also possible to include the contents of a
file from an external text file, so instead of having to copy-and-
paste your program in, you can actually pull it from code that you
know to compile :-) Helps save on typesetting issues with code errors.

It's possible to produce good quality PDF directly from a LaTeX file.
This might be good if you want to distribute an on-line book. I'm not
sure whether it would be good for professional typesetting, because
there may be problems importing a PDF. O'Reilly has LaTeX templates
and they do take manuscripts in this format for re-rendering. PDFs
can be generated with hyperlinks and table of contents, too. Indexes
are also possible, but requires some manual work inserting the
markers where you want the words to be mentioned (but this is not
significantly different from what you'd end up wanting to do if you
were making indices).

LaTeX is also good at having macros, so (provided that you write them
with this in mind) it's easy enough to generate special markers for
things like Note: in the margin. Also, if you want to change it to a
different rendering at a later stage, it's possible to change the
macro definition.

LaTeX is also predominantly text, so it makes it easier to use a text-
based version control system for diffs and the like. Incorporating
comments from other non-technical people makes it marginally more
difficult; but if you're using a Mac, you can annotate PDF documents
with post-it like functionality. Opening it in Preview, and selecting
the Annotation tool (%4) then you can add comments to places in the
document. There's also a changebar package that you can use (but
unfortunately only works for generating PostScript documents, since
it uses PostScript hackery to do the job).

My PhD thesis is available at http://www.bandlem.com/Alex/Papers/
PhDThesis.pdf which was generated from LaTeX. It has an index, and
table of contents in the PDF which are hyperlinkable. You can also
embed PDF (vector) images, which means they'll look good when printed
out.

Alex.

[ Vendor self-promotion, but I judge it as on-topic and helpful. Caveat Emptor... --Andrew ]

Brett,

This may be of no use to you for the kind of writing that you're
doing, but I've created a novel writing software program called
"Glass Writer." It's really aimed at fiction writers and so there are
no features for indexing and table of contents. There are a lot of
useful features such as viewing and editing more than one chapter at
a time, book marking, and much more.

I'd been juggling a half dozen unfinished novels for a number of
years, and I just couldn't finish one. I finally decided it was the
software's fault and not mine. Since last summer when I released the
first version of Glass Writer, I finished one novel (125,000 words)
and have 93,000 words of a second which had been sitting stagnant for
twenty years.

Check out http://www.glasswriter.com and see if it's something you're
interested in. Glass Writer 1.1.3 is free and Glass Writer 2 Pro is
$19.95.

Best of luck on your book,

Glen L. Bledsoe
http://www.glasswriter.com

Mellel <http://www.redlers.com/mellel.html> is a solid OSX word processor designed for long documents and professional writers.

See the reviews... <http://www.mellel.com/newsreviews.html> <http://www.mellel.com/newsusers.html> and comparison with Word, OpenOffice, Nisus Writer Express... <http://www.mellel.com/generalcomparison.html>

Mellel is clean, robust. It exports to plain text, RTF or Word. It doesn't even blink at a 25,000 word document.

Al Czarnecki <http://topstory.ca>

I can't imagine using Word for something longer than 100 pages. I was glad to have been forced to use Framemaker a couple years back to produce a document that was about 25 chapters (each its own file) and over 1000 pages (before final editing reduced it to about 20 chapters and about 800 pages). At first I was fairly annoyed at some of its idosyncrasies. But I quickly came to appreciate its versatility and robustness, especially compared to Word.

Most, if not every, technical equipment company for which I had or have inside knowledge, uses Framemaker for its manuals. Last I knew, Microsoft was also using Framemaker, not Word, for their manuals. (Do they still write manuals any more?)

I've been considering writing a technical book that would be about 300 pages. If I decide to go forward with this project, my current assumption is that I would buy a Windows machine solely for the ability to run Framemaker. Having been a devoted Mac user since the Mac II, this speaks to my opinion of Framemaker.

I doing my book using MarinerWrite. For the price, it seems to have all the necessary features, and can save in many formats, so it should be easy to transfer to another program if it proves inadequate. Nice format, easy to learn, and tiny use of memory. The company is responsive and promises that stability is a prime concern. Not enuf experience yet to evaluate it in depth, but so far, so good. http://www.marinersoftware.com/ Here's a review: http://www.mymac.com/showarticle.php?id=1736 And a performance test: http://www.barefeats.com/wp.html

Scribus is an open source page layout program that claims to have published a book using only free software start to finish. I've downloaded, but not played with it yet. http://www.scribus.org.uk/ Info and ratings: http://freshmeat.net/projects/scribus/

Ah, for Wordperfect for OS X! Maybe the change to Intel will finally bring it to Mac. Easy to learn, easy to use - how I miss it.

Anything beats BSWurd.

> A quick question: Is Word the only program with revision tracking
> and comments?

Quick answer: NeoOffice (OpenOffice) also does change tracking (with
optional comments). You can also see a list of all the changes in a
doc. See my previous post for more on NeoOffice.

On 09 Jan 2006, at 23:16 , John J Howard wrote:
> (Readers with aversion to pedantry should probably skip this message.)

[snip]

> Sadly for some, Word's worst feature is not its limitations, but
> rather that it is a pain in the ass.

[Puts on his robe and fuddy-duddy hat]

There hasn't been a good version of MSWord since version 5.

Seriously, it's gotten bloated and fat ever since, and impossible to
manage. I had a recent experience with MSWord that I found rather
annoying.

Someone sent me a MSWord doc and said "put this on page such-and-such
on the website." Great, I get to try to reproduce the format of the
MSWord document in html, always fun.

When I saved the word file as a html, a long list of bullets in the
original document became THREE different lists in the HTML.

"Aha!" I thought, "Now I know why word is always screwing up numbering."

At least with BBEdit, Tidy, and finally scrapping the word html and
using my wife's copy of Pages, then BBEdit and Tidy, I ended up with
some html that, while still rather cumbersome, at least worked and
passed validation, even if the page I had to insert it into didn't.

--
Rid yourself of doubt --
                                 or should you?
-George Carlin

Gentlemen: I am surprised that no one suggested tying "Pages", Apple's new word processor. Last year I finished writing a book of 233 pages, plus 12 pages of table of contents and list of illustrations, and 154 illustrations.  The illustrations were mostly scanned 35mm slides, some of which were taken fifty years or so ago.  To my delighted surprise, the Kodachrome and Anscochrome slides remained good after many years of indifferent storage.  The Ektachrome ones had all developed a strong reddish tint and were hard to rescue.  Apples iPhoto program provided an easy and effective way to improve these old photographs. The title of the book was "Some Nautical Tales". I first used MS Word, 2004 version.  When the book got to about 175 pages, the program began to give problems.  I broke it up into chapters but still had difficulties, particularly with inserting pictures.  They worked okay if they extended the full width of the text, but gave a lot of problems when I wanted the pictures to only occupy partial width with the text flowing around them.  I wanted some pictures to flow (move) when the text was later expanded and I wanted some to remain fixed in position. I next tried "Pages", and found it to be much easier to work with.  When I wanted a picture to remain anchored in place, I just clicked in the margin near where I wanted it.  I could then drag it to where I wanted it, resize it, and the text flowed around it without further adjustment.  If I wanted the pictures to move if the text was later expanded, I clicked inside the margin before insertion.  It was more stable and faster than Word had been.  I still had to break by work up into chapters, but could use bigger "chucks" of text, combining two, three or more chapters.   Making the table of contents became a problem, and I had to manually combine the ones generated from the different sections. I now use "Pages" for all of my correspondence and writing.  I think very highly of this word processor. When I had finished the writing, I then converted the sections of "Pages" text into Adobe PDF format and then combined them all into one whole PDF document (book). Very truly yours, V Captain Wilbur H. Vantine

On 11 Jan 2006, at 08:11, Google Kreme wrote: > When I saved the word file as a html, a long list of bullets in the > original document became THREE different lists in the HTML. Extraordinary you should say that today.  I have had a similar issue (but reversed) with an HTML file exported from FreeMind and opened in Word.  I thought it was me fat fingering somehow.  --  bignoseduglyguy http://www.bignoseduglyguy.com http://www.bignoseduglyguy.com/no8wire http://www.bignoseduglyguy.com/bnugwiki

Matt's right. Currently, FrameMaker is the only reliable tool for producing books on a Mac. That's why Apple still uses FrameMaker 6.0 in Classic to produce its own user guides. (That's gotta peeve Steve.)

Like thousands of others, my company still runs FrameMaker in Mac OS 9. It's fast, reliable, does the job, and cheap hardware is readily available by the shed load.

Apparently, Apple wants Adobe to revive FrameMaker for Mac OS X and it's important that anyone else who feels the same writes to Adobe executives. There are Apple employees who want FrameMaker for Mac OS X, as do some Adobe employees. Incidentally, Kevin Lynch, who developed the original Mac version of FrameMaker, is now an Adobe executive after the recent Adobe/Macromedia merger.

The FrameMaker for Mac OS X Petition is up to 3,320 signatures now.

<http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?fmforosx>

While FrameMaker is still available for Windows there is still hope. Adobe has the resources to produce FrameMaker for Mac OS X. It's up to us to give it the will.

FWIW, I have submitted 16 copies of the petition to Adobe executives, in two batches, and nine copies to Apple executives. I've also posted "FrameMaker for Mac OS X" Christmas cards to Adobe and Apple executives, written letters, and sent e-mails.

Many of us on the FrameMaker for Mac OS X mailing list have written to Adobe and Apple. Some, several times.

<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fmforosx/>

Write now to executives at Adobe and Apple.

Adobe: <http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/executivebios/main.html>

Apple: <http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=107357&p=irol-faq#corpinfo9>

The e-mail addresses of FrameMaker's product managers are in the public domain but they're not the one's making the big decisions. I do not have e-mail addresses of any executives, but you could always try using the first letter of their first name, followed by their family name company.com. Much better to write a letter though.

Paul

<http://www.infopage.net/fmforosx/>