On 2014-01-06, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Right. I think shifting people to LibreOffice is an excellent and >> realistic step toward imcreasing people's software and data freedom. > > Yeah. Which is why I do it. But the other night, my mum was trying to > lay out her book in LO, and was having some problems with the system > of having each chapter in a separate file. (Among other things, styles > weren't shared across them all, so a tweak to a style means opening up > every chapter and either doing a parallel edit or figuring out how to > import styles.) So yes, it's a realistic and worthwhile step, but it's > not a magic solution to all problems. She doesn't have time to learn a > whole new system. Maybe - in the long term - LaTeX would actually save > her time, but it's certainly a much harder 'sell' than LO.
Yea, I think laying out a book with something like MS Word or LibreOffice is nuts. Depending on her formatting needs, a lighter-weight mark-up language (something like asciidoc) might suite: http://asciidoc.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AsciiDoc I've used it to write a 150 page manual, and was quite happy with the results. It produces DocBook XML, PDF, HTML and a few other output formats (Including, I think, LibreOffice/OpenOffice). It's _much_ easier to get started with than LaTeX. For printing purposes the quality of the output is no match for TeX -- but it's better than a "word processor", and it does a very nice job with HTML output. -- Grant Edwards grant.b.edwards Yow! It's a hole all the at way to downtown Burbank! gmail.com -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
