Can anyone recommend from personal experience or knowledge, what software is
ideal for helping an author create a book?
Thanks
Brian

HI

KiwiBrian ha scritto:

What exactly you need?

To prepare text for a future book I use papel
http://www.beingarthurdent.co.uk/
For creating book I use PagePlus http://www.freeserifsoftware.com/
For graphic manipulation I use GIMP http://www.gimpitalia.it/forum/

on 01/07/2006 *KiwiBrian* wrote:

Hi KiwiBrian

For DTP (desktop publishing) works I say:

- *Scribus*

- *DTP blender*
http://dtpblender.instinctive.de/cms/Main/Home

open source, no needs to pay for commercial use

- For A5 booklet (2 A5 in one A4) and page imposition Use:

- OpenOffice
www.openoffice.org

that have an automatic sistem to arrange in right sequence, two A5 pages
in one A4 (and in other formats), ready to cut and collate

for other softwares (free) look at:

http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/05/05/1744245

this:
http://www.lyx.org/

Or this:
http://www.latex-project.org/

Hey, you're in luck, I'm an author, so I can tell you that it
makes absolutely no difference what software you use to write a
book. You know, before the days of computers, we used typewriters,
and they don't have software. I myself composed some of my early
books with a fountain pen.

Regardless of what you use to write your book, you should submit
it in a widely-accepted format. It used to be the practice that
publishers wanted books submitted in both hard copy (printed
pages) and in plain text files. That's no longer the case. Now
they will usually take hard copy along with Microsoft Word .DOC
files. Some don't even require the hard copy.

I use Microsoft Word 2000 for all my professional writing. I don't
need it, I could use Notepad, but I find it to be a good general
purpose word processor, and I like the find-and-replace editing
function in MS Word. The spell checker in MS Word is also very good.

Al Smith address.com> wrote:

Overkill for just *writing* texts, as is OpenOffice (imho), with the
cluttered interfaces, numerous never used features and options and
complex configuration (turning off most defaults). All you need is a
good simple text editor with a spell checker. If some basic layout is
required I would recommend an editor which handles RTF. There are
plenty of good free editors.

A useful program for organizing text clips, or even paragraphs or
chapters, before putting them together is Treepad.

Layout is the final step, and has nothing to do with the actual
*writing*.

BTW, I do a lot of writing but am still looking for the perfect free
text editor.

S.O. Meone

on 01/07/2006 *Al Smith* wrote:

Wrong! pdf is universal format for submission, not .doc (close format)

Word processing and book creation are two very different things,
impagination, imposition, ecc... are matter for DTP (desktop publishing
programs) not word processors.

MS Word is not an impaginator, and, in addition to this, it's payware, not
free!

Brian,

Different tools for different phases.

Early on I want something simple that doesn't get in the way of my
thinking. That's why I wrote Sudden View.

http://www.sudden.net/

Once I have my content down, I use Open Office to check spelling and
make it pretty.

But I suspect there are as many ways to write as there are writers.

Good luck.

Sudden Disruption

Hi

Here we have some good software:

http://www.ottiolu.net/odp/index.php?browse=/Arts/Writers_Resources/Software/Scr.../