[OS X TeX] Writing a book

["M. Tamer Özsu"]

John,

LaTeX is very flexible and it is possible to do all of what your friend wants in LaTeX. There are many sources but one that is commonly recommended is 

Guide to LaTeX by Kopka and Daly

Incidentally, you can see some book styles at http://www.latextemplates.com/cat/books. I am sure others can point to other examples and online sources.

One particular limiting issue that you need to consider seems to be that your publisher does not work with LaTeX, and this may restrict your options irrespective of what you can do within LaTeX. 

==Tamer

On Jan 30, 2014, at 9:05 AM, John B. Thoo <jthoo at yccd.edu> wrote:

> 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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