Tom, Actually, I have had very little struggle learning LO. I started back in the StarOffice days and haven’t looked back. I have just learned to keep LO in its place...as a business tool, not a tool for creative writing or desktop publishing.
You mention the Table of Contents. Yes, the first time I tried, I was mystified, but with practice, it’s become no big deal. But, like with most things in office suite software, you have to do a lot of adjusting, customizing, etc. to get what you want. With LaTeX, you simply type \tableofcontents in the place in your document where you want it to appear and, voila, you get it, fully formatted with the Table of Contents title properly typeset and in the right place. It’s even easier with the LyX front end. Two mouse clicks and it’s done. Yes, LO is an extremely powerful tool and, yes, with education, you can produce book length documents with master documents, subdocuments, tables of contents, etc. But, as I mentioned in my response to Fernand, you will not be able to match the professional output of LaTeX, with its full-featured typeset effects, proper paragraph justification, etc. But, as Pablo and I agree, LaTeX works best if you can accept its default formatting decisions. If you want to change them, you’ll have a bit of an education ahead of you. (And Pablo, you don’t have to create an entire document class to change the default settings; often just a few commands in the preamble are enough) So, either way, depending on the output you want, you have an education ahead of you. Either learn LO’s master document/table of contents system, or learn how to make some changes to LaTeX’s default settings. Virgil From: Tom Davies Sent: Tuesday, July 09, 2013 5:27 AM To: Virgil Arrington ; Mirosław Zalewski ; [email protected] Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Book-writing with Writer Hi :) When i first started using Writer i found i struggled against the software quite a bit. Often people try something new unaware of the baggage they bring with them (such as bad habits learned through years of using other products) and somehow keep managing to find unsuitable work-flows that do make it more difficult than it needs to be. It's like watching someone that is scared of the water splashing about and fighting (and failing) to stay on top. If you are now a good swimmer can you remember the first time you laid back and relaxed and found that human beings are naturally bouyant? That only small minimal strokes of your arms almost parallel to the surface are far more effective at keeping you above water than up&down strokes. For me it took a huge wrench in my mind. Other people seemed to find it easy. I have taught Word as part of ECDL and other courses and people generally think i am extremely proficient with it, at least until MSO 2007, but i often found that other people's documents were a nightmare to beat into shape. Even a tiny change often threw up some unexpected formatting tangle that they had somehow managed to root deep into their document. Also old documents written with previous versions often came out all wrong. With LibreOffice it is much easier to get a good looking result that behaves itself. However if you do fight against it all the time then maybe you do need to either 1. Read up on documentation and adjust to the software and/or 2. Experiment and play with documents created by other people to see how they did it and/or 3. Experiment and play around with different ways of doing things. See if you have any baggage or bad habits that you can break-down to simplify your work-flow Otherwise, if you are always struggling against the flow then you really are better off with something that does suite you. First time i used LO to do a ToC it was a major pain. 2nd time (and from then on) i found it amazingly easy. That first time i did mess around with all sorts of aspects of it to work out how to beat it into submission. Eventually i worked out how to use it rather than to fight against it. Now it's incredibly easy. Even after a radical change i just right-click and choose "update" and it fixes itself. "Simples" ;) Regards from Tom :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: Virgil Arrington <[email protected]> To: Mirosław Zalewski <[email protected]>; [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, 9 July 2013, 1:29 Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Book-writing with Writer Miroslaw, You're right; I did merge *writing* and *publishing*. To that end, let me muddy the waters even more by mentioning yWriter, a software program designed specifically and solely for writing novels with many of the tools you suggest. The frustration that I've found is that there are some publishing (or formatting) tasks that are best handled completely separate from writing, such as page layout, font selection, table of contents generation, etc. However, I find other formatting tasks are better handled on the fly while typing, such as applying italics to a word. Sometimes, I find seeing the paragraph layout onscreen helpful to organizing my thoughts, which of course you won't see with a strict text editor or pure LaTeX editor. At least LyX helps by showing some formatting onscreen. Anytime I use a program like yWriter, I end up spending a lot of time later applying formatting that I could have applied on the fly with a decent word processor. That may not be a concern for a person whose work will be published, and therefore formatted, by someone else, like a professional publishing house. But, the original poster mentioned self-publishing an e-book. Virgil -----Original Message----- From: Mirosław Zalewski Sent: Monday, July 08, 2013 5:51 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Book-writing with Writer On 08/07/2013 at 22:58, "Virgil Arrington" <[email protected]> wrote: > but to > me trying to write a book with LO Writer is like trying to force a square > peg into a round hole. Yes, it can be done, but the labor involved may not > be worth it. I think you merge two totally different ideas: writing a book and publishing a book. As for writing, Writer and LaTeX are pretty much comparable - they both sucks. They do not provide basic tools needed for writers, such as character descriptions (were her eyes blue or green?) or detailed outline of story (this is different than outline of chapters). Of course you can overcome it with nice note-taking app, custom wiki or organized papers, but in some other programs you do not have to. As for publishing (making it look beautiful), LaTeX classes and forced separation of structure and look usually provides better defaults than Writer. Agreed. But then, we talk about defaults. It's not like you can't change them. If you learn your tools and think in advance, create decent-looking long document in Writer can be done with little hassle. I have created and edited some long (100+ pages) documents in Writer and never seen anything in LaTeX that would be a dealbreaker for me. If anywhere, I would go to full-fledged DTP suite such as Adobe InDesign. -- Best regards Mirosław Zalewski -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
