kilimanjaro Posted December 18, 2007 Report Share Posted December 18, 2007 Aloha everybody I was wondering if anyone could make a suggestion for the best software for publishing a book. I want to create a botany field guide and I want to do it all myself. I will be using photos, maps and text. kili Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AussieJohn Posted December 18, 2007 Report Share Posted December 18, 2007 Scribus was designed for just such purpose. Cheers. John. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neddie Posted December 18, 2007 Report Share Posted December 18, 2007 Scribus was designed for just such purpose.I agree, that's the first place you should look. If you want more control, Latex (with a frontend like Kile) is much harder to use straight away but it's extremely powerful. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted December 18, 2007 Report Share Posted December 18, 2007 I agree with John. If you are using Linux, then Scribus is obviously the way to go - unless you want to spend thousands of dollars. In that case, there are e.g. Pagemaker, Quark-XPress, Dialog or InDesign available. (Primarily, I use Dialog at work. Nice tool but extremely expensive!) Give Scribus a try. If you need help, let us know. Some of us might be able to help you if you run into design-problems. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted December 18, 2007 Report Share Posted December 18, 2007 (edited) Latex isn't that difficult to use anymore (it has a few nice frontends), but its aimed at different type of publications. Scribus is the way to go- I agree with all the above. It works the same way Quark Xpress does, and has most of its functionality (although it doesn't accept Xtensions, of course...). Edited December 18, 2007 by scarecrow Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iphitus Posted December 18, 2007 Report Share Posted December 18, 2007 Another vote for LaTeX. Bit taller learning curve, but the output is brilliant. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg2 Posted December 18, 2007 Report Share Posted December 18, 2007 I suggest taking a look at using LyX as the gui for LaTeX. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kilimanjaro Posted December 18, 2007 Author Report Share Posted December 18, 2007 Thanks for all of the advice. I have scribus, and I will checkout latex. Now my next question, I will be collaborating with a guy who only uses windows. Can either of these save documents in windows compatible format? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neddie Posted December 18, 2007 Report Share Posted December 18, 2007 Tip: it only takes a few clicks in Wikipedia to find out which software runs on which platform. In short, Scribus runs on Windows too, and there are a bunch of Tex editors which run on all sorts of platforms - for example LyX runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. Kile, as its name suggests, runs on KDE so not (yet) on Windows, but you can create stuff on there and use any other Tex editor to edit the resulting file. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kilimanjaro Posted December 18, 2007 Author Report Share Posted December 18, 2007 Thanks neddie Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted December 18, 2007 Report Share Posted December 18, 2007 (edited) Scribus does run under windoze, with more or less the same functionality as under *nix, but it's extremely picky on the fonts used. Latex is less picky. Edited December 18, 2007 by scarecrow Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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