Re: [libreoffice-users] Book-writing with Writer

Miroslaw,

You're right; I did merge *writing* and *publishing*. To that end, let me 
muddy the waters even more by mentioning yWriter, a software program 
designed specifically and solely for writing novels with many of the tools 
you suggest. The frustration that I've found is that there are some 
publishing (or formatting) tasks that are best handled completely separate 
from writing, such as page layout, font selection, table of contents 
generation, etc. However, I find other formatting tasks are better handled 
on the fly while typing, such as applying italics to a word. Sometimes, I 
find seeing the paragraph layout onscreen helpful to organizing my thoughts, 
which of course you won't see with a strict text editor or pure LaTeX 
editor. At least LyX helps by showing some formatting onscreen.

Anytime I use a program like yWriter, I end up spending a lot of time later 
applying formatting that I could have applied on the fly with a decent word 
processor. That may not be a concern for a person whose work will be 
published, and therefore formatted, by someone else, like a professional 
publishing house. But, the original poster mentioned self-publishing an 
e-book.

Virgil

-----Original Message----- 
From: Mirosław Zalewski
Sent: Monday, July 08, 2013 5:51 PM
To: users@global.libreoffice.org
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Book-writing with Writer

On 08/07/2013 at 22:58, "Virgil Arrington" <cuyfalls@hotmail.com> wrote:

> but to
> me trying to write a book with LO Writer is like trying to force a square
> peg into a round hole. Yes, it can be done, but the labor involved may not
> be worth it.

I think you merge two totally different ideas: writing a book and publishing 
a
book.

As for writing, Writer and LaTeX are pretty much comparable - they both 
sucks.
They do not provide basic tools needed for writers, such as character
descriptions (were her eyes blue or green?) or detailed outline of story 
(this
is different than outline of chapters). Of course you can overcome it with 
nice
note-taking app, custom wiki or organized papers, but in some other programs
you do not have to.

As for publishing (making it look beautiful), LaTeX classes and forced
separation of structure and look usually provides better defaults than 
Writer.
Agreed.

But then, we talk about defaults. It's not like you can't change them.
If you learn your tools and think in advance, create decent-looking long
document in Writer can be done with little hassle.

I have created and edited some long (100+ pages) documents in Writer and 
never
seen anything in LaTeX that would be a dealbreaker for me. If anywhere, I
would go to full-fledged DTP suite such as Adobe InDesign.
--
Best regards
Mirosław Zalewski

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