How to typeset a book using Free Software

From ArticleWorld

Typesetting is a de-facto requirement in most European and North American colleges. Therefore, it should not be a surprise to see how there a lot of Open Source typesetting tools.

This guide will show you the most important of these tools available and explains what to use them from, along with the general procedure of typesetting.

Steps

Choose your tools. The most important choice is the typesetting program or language you will use. Most people recommend choosing a typestting language like TeX or SGML, because it allows you to separate the shape (looks) from the content, while maintaining the document easy to convert to a variety of formats.

1. It is very important not to start until the entire manuscript is ready. While it rarely happens, it is possible to end up having to change the entire shape of the document because of one chapter requiring something else than you initially thought.

2. Adapt the final style to the media which will be used to publish the book and to the audience. If you use TeX, you may want to have a look over the standard TeX styles and change what you need to change.

3. Design a "master page". This is a page (or more, depending on how you manage to fit) on which you use all the text styles and image insertion methods from the final document. Stick to it along the whole document, and, most important, be unitary. All the subtitles should look the same, all the figures should have the same type of captions and so on.

The task of designing this page is seriously simplified if you use something like TeX or SGML which allow you to define master styles. If you use a tool like Scribus, you may have some more hassles with this.

4. Start by typesetting a single chapter or section which you will use as a template for everything else. You can use tools like GNUplot for plotting, Dia for diagrams, Gimp for image manipulation and Xfig or Inkscape for vector drawing.

5. After you have successfully typeset the first chapter, move on to the other ones.

6. Generate tables of content, bibliographies and any kind of annotated lists at the end of everything. Special tools are available to automatically generate and maintain such elements from TeX or SGML documents.