6 ms·

> learn InDesign Ahem, or learn the open-source Tex/Latex, from which InDesign took inspiration. If you can format a beautiful scientific/mathematical textboo

by jnbiche 10y ago

> learn InDesign Ahem, or learn the open-source Tex/Latex, from which InDesign took inspiration. If you can format a beautiful scientific/mathematical textbook for print using Tex, you can format anything. And Pandoc is a great adjunct. But yes, it's not for people who wish to avoid screwing around with tooling. It's for perfectionists who want absolute control over layout/notation.

weeksie 10y ago
Writing a novel in LaTeX is not the best approach if you're looking to write a lot of text and don't have to worry about notation. But Neil Stephenson famously wrote Cryptonomicon in Emacs and LaTeX, so hey, it works for some people. Edited to add that InDesign is much easier for back matter, front matter, laying out images, covers, etc. . . . And that's coming from someone who LOVES LaTeX. I set my old software company with some sweet templates and all of our proposals were typeset in LaTeX. It was awesome. But if you're writing a novel for print I really wouldn't recommend it.
- perlgeek 10y ago
  I agree that writing large volumes of text in LaTeX is cumbersome, and the same goes for text that includes many code samples. \begin{verbatim}...\end{verbatim} is just too verbose, and \verb|...| for inline code is also too verbose to my taste. So right now I'm writing my book in Markdown, and put it on leanpub for now (https://leanpub.com/deploy https://leanpub.com/deploy). For print, I'll either figure out a way to get a PDF formatted as I want it from leanpub, or use pandoc to create the markdown to LaTeX, and then write a custom template with all the customization. But this is something that I won't worry too much about until the manuscript is really finished.
  - tjl 10y ago
    For code samples I prefer to have them in separate files and include them so it's just one command that imports them and formats them. I wrote both my Master's and Ph.D. theses in LaTeX and found it much better than the alternatives. With Markdown I'd be resorting to falling back on LaTeX anyway and many of the additional Markdown features weren't available when I wrote them. I had a predefined document class for my Master's but the university changed the guidelines by the time of my Ph.D. so I used the Memoir document class and that had a lot of flexibility and I didn't have to include many other packages to format things. I basically set up the format once at the beginning, checked against the guidelines once at the end and that was it.
- wodenokoto 10y ago
  I don't think you are supposed to write in LaTex anymore than you are supposed to write in InDesign
  - weeksie 10y ago
    Spoken like someone who has never encountered `auctex-mode`
  - jnbiche 10y ago
    ... anymore than you are supposed to write in HTML?
- Finnucane 10y ago
  FrameMaker would be even better than InDesign for creating books--it has better support for managing book structure, and has decent word-processing facilities--it's a much better 'all-in-one' tool.
  - cschmidt 10y ago
    I wrote my Ph.D. thesis in FrameMaker on a Mac. Then Adobe went and discontinued it on the Mac, which was much lamented. So now I write stuff in LaTeX instead.
- zafiro17 10y ago
  Respectfully, I disagree, but everyone has their favorite tools and procedures. I wrote a 350 page book [1] of mostly text with 500 references, initial quotations at the front of chapters, and illustrations. LaTeX was exactly what I needed [2], and the greatest pleasure of that experience was being able to choose my own tools instead of being mandated by some publisher to submit everything in Word. LaTeX did just fine with front and back matter; CTAN had examples of all this stuff [3] and it was well organized so required little searching. My work flow was basically emacs/auctex, some scripts to convert TeX to HTML and eventually XHTML, and Calibre and Sigil for the final touches. Working on a plain text format made for easy archiving, diffing, and compression. Can't imagine using something that requires and internet connection to work, like Google Docs (which I like, on the other hand, for other use cases). Happy to offer the epub or mobi to anyone who wants it, and the LaTeX source if you're curious how I made it work. Email my user name at gmail.com. [1] http://dictatorshandbook.net http://dictatorshandbook.net [2] http://therandymon.com/index.php?/categories/2-Tech/P2.html http://therandymon.com/index.php?/categories/2-Tech/P2.html [3] http://ctan.org http://ctan.org
Vervious 10y ago
> from which InDesign took inspiration Do you have a source? InDesign is much, much more than Latex, and certainly not just a derivative - though your post implies just that. Having spent many hobby-years in InDesign laying out newspaper spreads, magazines, covers, I'd argue that it has a fundamentally different, richer, use case, and is incomparable (unless you're just talking about technical documents).
- jnbiche 10y ago
  > Do you have a source? I don't have the source now, and I may be mistaken. I thought I remembered reading somewhere that InDesign's creators drew significant inspiration from Tex/LaTeX, but I can no longer find the original source. Perhaps I was thinking about QuarkXPress. I did not mean to imply it was a direct derivative. InDesign was openly created to compete with Quark, so its feature set was much more in line with Quark than with Tex. I completely agree that LaTeX is not ideal for designing magazines (although it's used by some academic journals), and its support for cover layout could be better (indeed, it took me longer than it should have to create a fairly simple book cover with Latex just last week). But as a typesetting system, it's great, and works great for books.
  - FraaJad 10y ago
    LaTeX is purely for text/formula/equation-heavy academic publishing. It was created for that purpose by Lesley Lamport. ConTeXt - http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page (an open source derivating of TeX) developed and supported commercially by Pragama - http://www.pragma-ade.com/ http://www.pragma-ade.com/ is what you should use for typesetting magazines etc., ConTeXt gives you complete artistic and layout control. While it is used heavily for non-technical publishing, people like Sanjoy Mahajan have used ConTeXt for publishing Math books like - "Street Fighting Mathematics" https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/street-fighting-mathematics https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/street-fighting-mathematics See resulting PDF: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/free_download/9780262514293_Street_Fighting_Mathematics.pdf https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/free_dow...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
theoh 10y ago
If you have a particular layout in mind, then InDesign takes about 1/10 of the time to learn as it would take to achieve mastery of e.g. the memoir package in TeX. TeX's not the right tool if you need immediate, precise, flexible control over page layout.
bitwize 10y ago
Make life easy on yourself. Learn InDesign.
aardvark179 10y ago
InDesign did take inspiration from TeX in the layout and hyphenation algorithms, but that doesn't make them totally equivalent. Although TeX does produce very good output InDesign is much better at eliminating rivers as it has an idea of the shape of the glyphs. I've seen stuff on doing this in TeX, but it was a feedback loop of producing the output, analysing it, and then tweaking the input to fix the problem.
lobster_johnson 10y ago
InDesign was the successor to PageMaker and a result of a strategy to outcompete Quark Xpress. I don't think it took much inspiration from TeX/LaTeX, given that it's a WYSIWYG tool with no markup language underneath.

by jnbiche 10y ago

weeksie 10y ago

Writing a novel in LaTeX is not the best approach if you're looking to write a lot of text and don't have to worry about notation. But Neil Stephenson famously wrote Cryptonomicon in Emacs and LaTeX, so hey, it works for some people. Edited to add that InDesign is much easier for back matter, front matter, laying out images, covers, etc. . . . And that's coming from someone who LOVES LaTeX. I set my old software company with some sweet templates and all of our proposals were typeset in LaTeX. It was awesome. But if you're writing a novel for print I really wouldn't recommend it.

perlgeek 10y ago
I agree that writing large volumes of text in LaTeX is cumbersome, and the same goes for text that includes many code samples. \begin{verbatim}...\end{verbatim} is just too verbose, and \verb|...| for inline code is also too verbose to my taste. So right now I'm writing my book in Markdown, and put it on leanpub for now (https://leanpub.com/deploy https://leanpub.com/deploy). For print, I'll either figure out a way to get a PDF formatted as I want it from leanpub, or use pandoc to create the markdown to LaTeX, and then write a custom template with all the customization. But this is something that I won't worry too much about until the manuscript is really finished.
- tjl 10y ago
  For code samples I prefer to have them in separate files and include them so it's just one command that imports them and formats them. I wrote both my Master's and Ph.D. theses in LaTeX and found it much better than the alternatives. With Markdown I'd be resorting to falling back on LaTeX anyway and many of the additional Markdown features weren't available when I wrote them. I had a predefined document class for my Master's but the university changed the guidelines by the time of my Ph.D. so I used the Memoir document class and that had a lot of flexibility and I didn't have to include many other packages to format things. I basically set up the format once at the beginning, checked against the guidelines once at the end and that was it.
wodenokoto 10y ago
I don't think you are supposed to write in LaTex anymore than you are supposed to write in InDesign
- weeksie 10y ago
  Spoken like someone who has never encountered `auctex-mode`
- jnbiche 10y ago
  ... anymore than you are supposed to write in HTML?
Finnucane 10y ago
FrameMaker would be even better than InDesign for creating books--it has better support for managing book structure, and has decent word-processing facilities--it's a much better 'all-in-one' tool.
- cschmidt 10y ago
  I wrote my Ph.D. thesis in FrameMaker on a Mac. Then Adobe went and discontinued it on the Mac, which was much lamented. So now I write stuff in LaTeX instead.
zafiro17 10y ago
Respectfully, I disagree, but everyone has their favorite tools and procedures. I wrote a 350 page book [1] of mostly text with 500 references, initial quotations at the front of chapters, and illustrations. LaTeX was exactly what I needed [2], and the greatest pleasure of that experience was being able to choose my own tools instead of being mandated by some publisher to submit everything in Word. LaTeX did just fine with front and back matter; CTAN had examples of all this stuff [3] and it was well organized so required little searching. My work flow was basically emacs/auctex, some scripts to convert TeX to HTML and eventually XHTML, and Calibre and Sigil for the final touches. Working on a plain text format made for easy archiving, diffing, and compression. Can't imagine using something that requires and internet connection to work, like Google Docs (which I like, on the other hand, for other use cases). Happy to offer the epub or mobi to anyone who wants it, and the LaTeX source if you're curious how I made it work. Email my user name at gmail.com. [1] http://dictatorshandbook.net http://dictatorshandbook.net [2] http://therandymon.com/index.php?/categories/2-Tech/P2.html http://therandymon.com/index.php?/categories/2-Tech/P2.html [3] http://ctan.org http://ctan.org

Vervious 10y ago

> from which InDesign took inspiration Do you have a source? InDesign is much, much more than Latex, and certainly not just a derivative - though your post implies just that. Having spent many hobby-years in InDesign laying out newspaper spreads, magazines, covers, I'd argue that it has a fundamentally different, richer, use case, and is incomparable (unless you're just talking about technical documents).

jnbiche 10y ago
> Do you have a source? I don't have the source now, and I may be mistaken. I thought I remembered reading somewhere that InDesign's creators drew significant inspiration from Tex/LaTeX, but I can no longer find the original source. Perhaps I was thinking about QuarkXPress. I did not mean to imply it was a direct derivative. InDesign was openly created to compete with Quark, so its feature set was much more in line with Quark than with Tex. I completely agree that LaTeX is not ideal for designing magazines (although it's used by some academic journals), and its support for cover layout could be better (indeed, it took me longer than it should have to create a fairly simple book cover with Latex just last week). But as a typesetting system, it's great, and works great for books.
- FraaJad 10y ago
  LaTeX is purely for text/formula/equation-heavy academic publishing. It was created for that purpose by Lesley Lamport. ConTeXt - http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page (an open source derivating of TeX) developed and supported commercially by Pragama - http://www.pragma-ade.com/ http://www.pragma-ade.com/ is what you should use for typesetting magazines etc., ConTeXt gives you complete artistic and layout control. While it is used heavily for non-technical publishing, people like Sanjoy Mahajan have used ConTeXt for publishing Math books like - "Street Fighting Mathematics" https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/street-fighting-mathematics https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/street-fighting-mathematics See resulting PDF: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/free_download/9780262514293_Street_Fighting_Mathematics.pdf https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/free_dow...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

theoh 10y ago

If you have a particular layout in mind, then InDesign takes about 1/10 of the time to learn as it would take to achieve mastery of e.g. the memoir package in TeX. TeX's not the right tool if you need immediate, precise, flexible control over page layout.

bitwize 10y ago

Make life easy on yourself. Learn InDesign.

aardvark179 10y ago

InDesign did take inspiration from TeX in the layout and hyphenation algorithms, but that doesn't make them totally equivalent. Although TeX does produce very good output InDesign is much better at eliminating rivers as it has an idea of the shape of the glyphs. I've seen stuff on doing this in TeX, but it was a feedback loop of producing the output, analysing it, and then tweaking the input to fix the problem.

lobster_johnson 10y ago

InDesign was the successor to PageMaker and a result of a strategy to outcompete Quark Xpress. I don't think it took much inspiration from TeX/LaTeX, given that it's a WYSIWYG tool with no markup language underneath.