What publishing software do you use?

Posted by Franz Grieser
Jan 12, 2007 at 02:17 PM

Hi.

This may be a bit off-topic (OTOH, I am sure a lot of people here create output that goes to a printer or to a web site): What kind of publishing tools do you use?

I am particularly interested in tools for publications that are 100 and more pages, contain images (color separation required) and tables, have a TOC and an index (generated by the tool) and have cross-references (i.e. links that bring you to a different part of the document). The documents have to be output to PDF files and are printed either on a digital printing machine or an offset printer. The tool should support Adobe Type 1 fonts as well as Truetype.

What do you use: Word, OpenOffice.org Writer, Indesign, Framemaker, Corel Ventura, Latex/Tex, Lyx ...? What would you recommend? What would you never use because of bad experience?

The reason why I ask: I earn part of my living writing and translating software documentation. A new customer asked me to update a 300 page manual written in OpenOffice.org Writer that contains a hundred bitmap images and a lot of cross-references. He decided to have it typeset using Indesign on a Mac (the previous versions were typeset in Quark). Now, the typesetter - who didn’t know Indesign before (he is a Photoshop wizard) struggled hard to get the Word files I prepared for him into Indesign. He did not manage to get Indesign to accept the Word styles and turn them into Indesign styles. I do not know if that is possible - but expect a tool designed for long publications to do so. Maybe the typesetter just does not know his tool.

Now, I think about doing the typesetting for the next manuals by myself. I typeset a number of books I published in the 80s and 90s using Ventura Publisher and Framemaker, later I had to use Word (never again, please) and am looking for a tool to do the job today.

BTW: OpenOffice.org Writer is not really an option: It crashed when I was halfway through the manual making the file unreadable (I only lost 10 minutes of work as I constantly backup and save the files under a new name). So I decided to split the document up, which cured the problems. I know that OpenOffice.org supports global documents - I might give that feature a try (but the experience I have made with that feature in Word was desastrous).

Greetings from Germany, Franz