Mastodawn

Charlie Stross May 20

Welp, I have just cancelled my Microsoft Office 365 recurring subscription.

Two reasons.

1. I only ever use it to check tracked changes to the copy edits on novels—once a year—which my publishers process in Word. As of this month, LibreOffice is good enough for the job (just tested at book length).

2. CoPilot in Office would open me up to accusations of breach of contract—my book contracts warrant that they're all my own work: CoPilot brings that into question.

So good riddance to Office365!

I'm testing LO for highly formatted tech ebooks, and rocketing towards that same decision at ~.7C.

@mwl @cstross
Not sure it's that much relevant, but LaTeX support in the LibreOffice helped me to go through the uni years as an applied mathematics student without ever touching MS Word and MathType or equivalents. 20 years ago already.
So, I highly recommend grasping it for whatever challenge of writing and editing you have. Maybe it'd be even easier to use than you think.

@gemelen @mwl @cstross I use LyX most of the time, that's at an interesting intersection — text only with out-of-band markup like an office suite, but layout is done with LaTeX, and they will not predict hyphenation, line or page breaks and instead fit the text into the window.

Super useful because you can use a font size and window width that is convenient, there's no horizontal scrolling and it has no effect on the output.

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@mwl @cstross
Not sure it's that much relevant, but LaTeX support in the LibreOffice helped me to go through the uni years as an applied mathematics student without ever touching MS Word and MathType or equivalents. 20 years ago already.
So, I highly recommend grasping it for whatever challenge of writing and editing you have. Maybe it'd be even easier to use than you think.

@gemelen @cstross Sadly, LaTeX will not work. Been there, done that.

https://mwl.io/faq#tools

Frequently Asked Questions – Michael W Lucas

Charlie Stross May 20

@gemelen @mwl I have zero use for equation writing and LaTeX is absolutely horrible for everything else.

@cstross @gemelen

I could, in theory, benefit from LaTex for super-highly-formatted tech books.

But some POD printers don't work with the PDFs produced.

Which POD printers? No freaking clue. IngramSpark provides zero feedback or debugging. They just pull my book from distribution globally until I "fix the problem."

A book that was fine for years can get its first order in Malaysia, or Guam, and boom! Firmware that hasn't been updated since Clinton was president shuts me down worldwide. (Yes, B&N experimented with POD in the 90s and those machines are still in use. Fourth-hand.)

If it happens too often, Ingram will drop me entirely.

Not worth it.

Jack Yan (甄爵恩)May 21

@mwl Does Bookvault work with old PDFs? I tend to find them pretty good, but I know not everyone does. Happy to take a look at your file to see if I spot anything. (Not a tech expert but I have worked a bit on pre-press stuff.)

@cstross @gemelen

@jackyan @cstross @gemelen

You need to use the 2001 or 2003 PDF standards, so yes.

Jack Yan (甄爵恩)May 21

@mwl Just to clarify, was this answering my Bookvault question (in which case, thank you) or yes to me taking a look at the file (still happy to)?

@jackyan The Bookvault question

Jack Yan (甄爵恩)May 21

@mwl Great, thank you.

Simon Waldman May 21

@mwl 😯 wow, that's terrible
@cstross @gemelen

Martin Schröder May 20

@cstross
I strongly disagree, but would suggest using Markdown, e.g. Pandoc. That should be good enough for your novels.
@gemelen @mwl

Charlie Stross May 21

@oneiros @gemelen @mwl Markdown is, oddly, what I use for casual writing: it's not what the publishing industry runs on, though, and I need to feed into other organizations' workflow.

Jens Finkhäuser May 21

@cstross @oneiros @gemelen @mwl I attended a talk by @pluralistic over a decade ago where he recounted introducing his publisher to the wonders of version control systems.

D Ingram May 20

@cstross @gemelen @mwl Scribus looks nice as a "proper" book formatting product. I have had a need to use it for real (LyX and Latex got me through a thesis), but tinkering showed promise. https://www.scribus.net/
(Multi platform OSS)

Scribus – Open Source Desktop Publishing

Slash909uk May 21

@ingram @cstross @gemelen @mwl
Currently using Scribus to publish our local community magazine. Around 40 pages once a month. Output to PDF seems acceptable to my local print shop so far 👍 I can get an edition ready in about 2 days. It has python scripting which really helps with automating the ad placement. But we are off topic slightly here..

(Scribus is a page layout tool; more a replacement for Adobe InDesign than a word processing tool.)

@Slash909uk @ingram @cstross @gemelen again, not the problem https://mwl.io/faq#tools

Frequently Asked Questions – Michael W Lucas

Dr. Yurii Radiev May 21

@cstross @gemelen @mwl Just out of curiosity, how is LaTeX horrible for everything else but writing equations? I have never used LaTeX to write a book, only some lab manuals and currently my PhD thesis.

Charlie Stross May 21

@kungfyurii @gemelen @mwl Massive cognitive overload of learning any embedded-command typesetting language. (And yes, I used to work with troff for a living.) I do not need that: in fact, Markdown is overkill in complexity terms for writing a novel.

Dr. Yurii Radiev May 21

@cstross @gemelen @mwl Ah, I see, I can totally understand and agree with that. Thank you for the explanation!

Ignazio Palmisano May 21

@gemelen @mwl @cstross if the editor does it in word, it's the editor you need to convince.

@ignaziop1977 @gemelen @cstross

An author's ability to produce LaTeX is not the problem. https://mwl.io/faq#tools

Frequently Asked Questions – Michael W Lucas

Simon Richter May 21

@gemelen @mwl @cstross I use LyX most of the time, that's at an interesting intersection — text only with out-of-band markup like an office suite, but layout is done with LaTeX, and they will not predict hyphenation, line or page breaks and instead fit the text into the window.

Super useful because you can use a font size and window width that is convenient, there's no horizontal scrolling and it has no effect on the output.