4 ms·
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
by 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 agoI 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 agoFor 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 agoI don't think you are supposed to write in LaTex anymore than you are supposed to write in InDesign
- Finnucane 10y agoFrameMaker 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 agoI 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 agoRespectfully, 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