[OS X TeX] Writing a book

[Pierre LAUGINIE]

I, also, claim : *don't write your book in Word!* The result is ugly.

You should try to find another publisher, there are among the world. I 
recall my example:

Some years ago, I had to write a paper for the journal "Pour la 
science", the french edition of "Scientific American". I wrote it in 
LaTeX (there were a drawing and photos) that was accepted. I sent it to 
the board editor and encountered him at his office. Then, what happened?

My LaTeX source was in his computer. He launched Quark X Press. Then, 
immediately, the LaTeX source was transformed into the final document in 
the journal style, he could directly modify the page set-up, style of 
titles, paragraphs, pictures and so on. We could discuss directly on the 
final set up. Clearly, he had a direct output LaTeX -> Quark X Press.

Any serious publisher should be able to do this.

Better find another publisher rather than re-writing your book in Word. 
It might seem easy at the beginning, but in fact, it is very tedious, 
troublesome and unsatisfactory. Word *is not* a professional software.

Hope you will succeed,

Pierre Lauginie


Le 30/01/2014 15:05, John B. Thoo a écrit :
> Hello, everyone.
>
> This is not directly a Mac TeX question, so I hope you will forgive me for asking here.
>
> A friend and I are working on a book.  I've written it using
>
> \documentclass[11pt]{amsbook}
> \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
> \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
>
>
> It turns out that the publisher does not work with (La)TeX and, unfortunately, my LaTeX skills are very basic.  (E.g., I kludged the exercise sections using the enumerate environ.  I wish I knew a better way to include exercises so that they would be better formatted and particular exercises would be easier to reference from the text.)  My friend, thus, raised the following concern.
>
> "So the book would look exactly like how it types sets for you. So it would look like a very long article. To get different color, size and style fonts for things like section tiles, text to wrap around images, sidebars, and all the other things that make a text book look appealing, we would need to do it in Word. so the question is do we stick with what we have because it is almost done and you have put sooooo much time into the Tex, or switch to Word so it can look like other texts?"
>
> Now, I don't use Word.  I don't even have a copy of Word.  My question is, can my friend's concerns be addressed using LaTeX and, if so, where do you suggest I learn how to do it?
>
> Here is a draft that shows what the book format looks like now.
>
> <http://ms.yccd.edu/Data/Sites/1/userfiles/facstaff/jthoo/cvandpubs/books/imh_dft20130913.pdf>  (77 MB)
>
> I am still using TeX Live 2012 in XQaurtz.  (I type in vi.)  I should upgrade to the latest.
>
> Thanks very much in anticipation for your advice.
>
> Yours sincerely,
>
> ---John.
>
> (I receive the digest of this mailing list.)
>
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-- 
Pierre LAUGINIE
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