Use a raw ascii editor and a markup language. Markdown is a good start.
This is actually my preferred option. Sure, you lose WYSIWYG, but for a book, there is really very little value in that that is important to you.
What you do get is highly consistent formatting. You are avoiding doing silly things like formatting with the return key or tabs. The markup processor handles everything you need, and you can change the formatting trivially for the entire document.
In the extreme {\LaTeX} is a great way to go. But unnecessary for a simple homespun book.
I’m sorry that I have no specific advice to offer to the OP, just my sympathies, and total agreement with the above. I myself still use Office 2003 and its various components including Word, with a plugin for Word to handle the newer .docx formats. I refuse to downgrade to the newer versions since Microsoft completely screwed up the standard Windows UI from Office 2007 onwards, while introducing bloated functionality that no one needs.
That said, I’m not sure what the specific problem would be in using something like Word 2003 for the OP’s needs. However, a book – even a book for younger folks – is a fairly large document with potentially more elaborate formatting than many typical documents. I’ve worked with Word on large documents, and believe me, it can be a nightmare. For a variety of historical reasons, the code in Word was a mess of tangled spaghetti code that evolved in various ways for various reasons and ended up being the exact opposite of structured, modular, manageable code. It’s been no surprise that some minor formatting change could cause Word – either by design or by buggy accident – to reformat an entire gigantic document into gibberish. I have personally lived this nightmare. The reason Word went berserk was usually completely unrelated to the change made to the document, and basically incomprehensible.
MS Word is, in fact, a valuable tool and I use it often, but these days mostly for minor stuff, since I don’t do large work-related reports any more (some of the stuff I used to do ran to thousands of pages, and was of course accordingly partitioned). What can I say except that Word is shitty software that has evolved over a long period of time into mostly pretty useful shitty software, although I doubt that most people use more than 1% of its capabilities.
Assuming the ultimate goal is to come up with the text in a Word-compatible file formatted using a 12-point Courier font, 1-inch margins, ragged right justification, and so on, you don’t need to worry about using Word at all, not even a little bit.
What I would do is use a good plain text editor, and once everything is finished and ready, read it into LibreOffice or similar, set up the required formatting related to font size, etc., and save the result as a odf or docx or whatever the instructions tell you to submit.
Unless I misunderstood the OP, WYSIWYG or fancy formatting is irrelevant. The goal is literally to produce something that, if printed out, looks like it could have been typed on a Selectric. This isn’t streamlined academic press or self-publishing where you yourself need to come up with camera-ready copy.
Not really. My previous programs would turn out camera-ready copy. The goal is simply a word processing program my limited brain can make function without much frustration. I don’t want to reproduce 1980, just 2005 or so (I lose track of when I lost track).
The majority of people on the Dope appear to be not just tech savvy but work or worked in the industry. I am not like that. At all. My skill sets are all in the arts, and what you might call homesteading, farming, wilderness stuff, nothing whatsoever to do with tech. Anti-tech. Luddite.
I had a sort of handle on it, in that I could write basic html to make basic websites and such, but that was more than ten years ago. Since then, the complexity has exploded and I acquired an auto-immune disease that exhausts and limits me, and the combination has destroyed my will to master the ever-new challenges.
I’ve observed that it can be quite difficult for those to whom tech stuff is a matter of everyday mastery to grasp just how frustrating it is for those for whom it isn’t. I find that the majority of people I encounter who are 70 and older (who never worked in the industry) are pitifully helpless in the new world of click; just as you figure out how to get the basic job done, the one that back when, was utterly straightforward if limited, you are dumped out of the airplane again. There seems no point in even trying to learn something that will be useless all over again in a year. Don’t get me started on fucking Photoshop.
I won’t have the juice to try out the suggestions offered for awhile – maybe even until the temperatures start plummeting and outdoor work becomes very limited, which is when I start my larger indoor projects up – but I will indeed try them out and figure out what will work for me.
I pretty much felt the same way the OP does about Word until one of my associates suggested that I take 10-15 minutes and change the settings in Word. You know…no automatic bullets, no spell-check, no auto-complete, no body/header formatting crap, etc. Once I did that, I found life was much simpler. Plus, Word DOES have some useful features that come in handy but generally stay hidden unless you actually need them.
I third that suggestion. I volunteer at the local public library, helping with the computer literacy classes; the attendees tend to be older folks (I’m old too, so I can relate to them). I’ve seen many people come to the Google Docs class without a clue, and an hour later they’re perfectly comfortable with it.
Microsoft offers an online version of Word that might also meet the OP’s needs. It’s pretty bare-bones, but does handle pagination and headers/footers.
On an Intel Mac you can run emulators and load System 6.0.8 and MacWrite Pro. Or MacOS 7.6 and WordPerfect 3.1 Or crank up Parallels or VMWare and boot MacOS 10.10 and Word 2011. Or for that matter MSDOS 5.0 and WordPerfect 5.1
I’m sure the M1 platform will end up having emulators too, but they seem a bit short on them at the moment unless you like to deal with source code and unsupported software.
I sympathize with the OP’s dilemma. 95% of everything I write could be done satisfactorily in WordStar 1.0 for CP/M, if only I could find a copy, a computer to run it on, and a way to export the file to the year 2021.
If you have a Mac, it comes with a simple word processor, TextEdit, which can save documents in Rich Text Format (RTF). More recent version can even embed images. It’s simple and probably does everything you need. Look for it in your Applications folder.
a) How new is your Mac? Do you know if it uses an Intel processor or the brand-new M1 processor? If you don’t know, go to the Apple menu and pick “About this Mac”; the second line is “Processor”; if it says “Intel” something-or-other, it’s an Intel based Mac; if it doesn’t it may be one of the new M1 Macs
b) If it uses an Intel processor, you can install programs that let you run older operating system (Mac OR Windows PC) and within those environments you can run whatever older word processor everyone upthread has been chatting about you running as an alternative.
The problem with running “classic” word processors like WriteNow or Word 5.1 on a mac is that they were written in 68000 assembly language (a processor not used by current Macs) and ran on a really old version of the operating system. If there were a way to run them seamlessly today, I would say go ahead and use them, but I very much doubt there is OS support for that out of the box.
Have you tried at least the free LibreOffice Writer?
Dynamic binary translation between different processor architectures is a thing, so not sure it matters so much what CPU you have as much as Apple simply not supporting System 6 programs any more. There are all sorts of emulators you can still use, but the question is how seamlessly the word processor will run (and, for non-Word processors, the trouble of converting documents to a format the publisher will deal with)
Ignoring the parts I don’t want to use isn’t the problem. It’s trying to find the parts I do want. Say I want to center page numbers at the bottom of every page, with a hard page break before every new chapter, of this book. I used to be able to just … do that, in a menu called something logical like “pagination”. Now? There’s ten menus, all named something vague like Transfer or Viewpoint (I’m making this up), Click on a menu and there is nothing like pagination offered, just things that highlight a box that now follows my cursor around turning paragraphs into footnotes or else ask me for the name and email of the person I am going to send this document to since it has already helpfully formatted into a read-only .pdf with no obvious way to undo it.