Hi,
As an alternative to LaTeX, especially if you design the book, you may give ConTeXt a chance. Just several elements of comparison with LaTeX Cons: * quite hard learning-curve * documentation is hard to find a the beginning. The reference manual is not maintained any more. Things are however better than three years ago: the ConTeXt excursion book has been updated. Official documentation is now split into manuals dealings with specific issues (tables, biblio, XML and so on). * ConTeXt is a niche even inside the *TeX world. * Publishers usually ask for LaTeX. * You have to design your layout from scratch (no documentclass shiped, only paper format) Pros: * you don't need to upload packages, and check for incompabilities. I have been using it a lot for three years now, and never loaded any third-part module. * bibliography out of the box, which is great since I could'nt have biber working on OpenBSD. * metapost graphics out of the box. MP graphics compile faster than TikZ since there are tightly integrated with base code (the user base is however much smaller than TikZ) * its key-value syntax is quite predictible, once you're used at it. * you can have XML and EPUB output (default is PDF) * smaller base than LaTeX if you install it as a standalone (260M, mostly because of fonts). I could'nt manage to install the Mkiv standalone version (being too stupid to patch its install script), but Hans Hagen released a distribution of luametatex, the development version of ConTeXt, a few weeks ago and it is available for OpenBSD. http://www.pragma-ade.com/install.htm Troubles with pdf inclusions can be bypassed uploading those luametatex binaries after installation http://dl.contextgarden.net/build/luametatex/amd64-openbsd6.6/luametatex Regards, Damien Thiriet
