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What about Apple Pages? I find that very good and easy to deal with typesetting. But I am no expert in the field so it might have sever weaknesses I am not awar
by jernfrost 11y ago
What about Apple Pages? I find that very good and easy to deal with typesetting. But I am no expert in the field so it might have sever weaknesses I am not aware of. Anyway I like that it seems to have been designed with layout in mind from the start unlike MS Word e.g. where doing layout has never felt natural.
- coolsunglasses 11y agoTypesetting isn't the same as word processing, you need a lot more power than something like Pages gives you. For example, our book is 308,000 words and 32 chapters. By the time it's done it'll probably be ~310-325k plus index. LaTeX means I can change one line in the header and have the build completely re-typeset the book according to those parameters programmatically, and it does a _very_ good job. Re: index - how do you generate an index with Apple Pages? And I don't mean concordance, I mean a proper index. With LaTeX it's...programmatic. We provide the metadata in the form of `\index{blah}`, it generates the index for us. It's extremely hard to find anything that's competitive on all these fronts and which is also open source. LaTeX is pretty much it, everything else is focused only on basic formatting & presentation and hasn't even gotten to a proper typesetting algorithm.
- baldfat 11y agoA word processor is a totally different beast from type setting. https://programmingforresearch.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/word-processor-versus-typesetter-2/ https://programmingforresearch.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/word... Though people have been trying to solve this in Word and templates but those still fail at technical books still IMHO.