I’ll have the need for a professional program to edit an academic publication in the near future. The last time I did that, we used Word, which is a real pain for the kind of work we’ve had to do. Here’s a few datapoints for what we need:
the original manuscript will be in Word
it’s academic, so there’ll be lots of footnotes
there will be pictures within the text
it’ll need to be able to do everything that Word does crummily: line and word breaks, page breaks all on one level, the ability to place individual characters lower in the line than the rest (for numbers especially)
I’ve looked at Quark, but I cannot seem to find out if it will deal with footnotes and importing from Word and other essentials. Can someone point me to a good program? The university will pay, so cost is not an immediate factor around the 300-500$ mark, but if it’s considerably more expensive, I might get told to keep using word…
That seems less than unequivocal praise :). So don’t ask me, I ask you – does it do all that would be required of it in an academic setting? Have you used it for the purposes described?
Hhhm, if what Publisher offers is compatibility, I’d probably take what the other programs are claiming as compatibility with a grain of salt. I’ve tried Publisher, but on importing the last book manuscript we edited, it takes over neither page size, nor line breaks, nor page breaks, nor format choices, nor footnotes, nor living columns of any type. So Publisher’s out…
Commenting again: a check on the various Microsoft forums indicates that Publisher does not support either footnotes or endnotes, which basically ends its career as an academic publishing tool…
The academics I know use LaTeX (careful when googling!) for publications. The learning curve is fairly steep, but it’s worth the effort if you plan on doing a lot.
I don’t know of any programs that are exactly what you’re looking for. If you have a favorite geek text editor (Emacs, Vi, Textmate, etc.) it should have good LaTeX support.
I’d sooner leave it in Word than try to use Publisher for a document like this.
InDesign is the current Big Daddy of the publishing world, I wouldn’t spend money to start up with Quark these days. I know that technical book layout is a subtle art and that folks I know in the busuiness tend to use lots of third-party plug-ins to add features and automation to the mix. Lots of planning helps, like building complete sets of style sheets and grids. But I mostly do packaging so it’s all a bit fuzzy to me.
Framemaker might not be a bad choice either, but I’m not clear on how well Adobe has kept it up-to-date. It languished for quite a while, I believe.
Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress definitely support MS Word (both ID and QXP recognize that, for better or worse, Word is the standard word processing program) – for instance, a superscripted or subscripted numberal created in a Word document will be retained when importing that document into InDesign (as will font, point size, leading, etc.) Of course, all of those factors can be changed, if needed, once the text is imported.
It’s been a number of years since I’ve worked with QXP, but I have no problem recommending ID (and agreeing that attempting to create a long document with Publisher will just end in tears).
While I don’t have much experience with footnote production, I do know that InDesign creates footnotes quite easily; see this video on Adobe’s Web site for an idea (btw, the narrator of that video, David Blatner, is something of a guru in the desktop publishing world).
I know that you can download a trial version of InDesign, and you can probably do the same for QuarkXPress, from their respective Web sites.
I’ve used LaTeX a lot. Quite a lot, actually. If it were me, I’d use it for this, as I can do all of those things easily.
Whether or not it’s the best choice for you depends on how comfortable you are with a markup language, and how much you intend on using it later. If it’s just for this project, the time spent learning LaTeX is better spent just fiddling with Quark.
Also, I’m presuming this is a Windows system. I know LaTeX works on Windows, but I don’t know how clunky it is. I’ve only used it on Linux(which is as smooth as anything on Linux: not very) and Mac(TeXShop makes it easy).
I’ve used QXP and Adobe InDesign and both will get the job done. It’s pretty simple to import things in from Word, too, which was where the majority of content came from (I preferred InDesign for this, actually).
Additionally, the publishing house I work for part-time uses InDesign and it’s relatively easy to learn and creates nice, professional publications.
If you’re going to print this book, why not ask the printer what they prefer to work with? I work for a printing company and we used to use Quark a lot, but now it’s mostly Adobe InDesign.
LaTeX works perfectly on Windows (search for MikTeX, it’s actually nicer using LaTeX on Windows that Linux—MiKTeX provides a handy GUI program for downloading and installing style files and packages from CTAN) and has a number of free editors/shareware editors available.
I’d use LaTeX, but I’m already proficient (to an extent) with it. It will be relatively straightforward to produce a great looking document with it (and it is used professionally, I have numerous books that have obviously been typeset in LaTeX).
Oh, and the best part is it’s free and almost completely bug free.
A large number of experts will tell you that InDesign has the best composer in the business, which is part of the reason it finally allowed Adobe to top Quark for market share. What that means is its way of automatically deciding where to break lines and how to space words looks best and needs the least tweaking by the layout person.
It’s also fairly powerful at indexing, though not as good (yet) as Framemaker once was, so I’m told.
One thing you’ll want, using these programs, is a large monitor or a dual monitor setup. These things are crazy with palettes, so you want some space for the page and more space for the palettes. I’d recommend you not get earlier versions, as the palettes were even worse before Creative Suite 3 with its dock.
Not as compatible as you might think. Just because it’s sold by the same company doesn’t mean the programmers talked to each other.
I dis-recommend MS Publisher. It is not up to any serious task, and by serious, I mean anything larger than a 1 page doc. Use Adobe InDesign or Quark – they’re the industry standards for layout. InDesign is on top right now.
You shouldn’t have any compability problems with InDesign and Word that can’t be overcome. That’s probably the most common combination in the industry today.
I do this for a living. In my office, we have to be compatible with Word and WorkPerfect and sometimes we leave the document in whatever it comes in and import it to a PDF file for printing. (For instance, if it has 1500 footnotes, and it’s in WordPerfect, it is staying in WP.)*
But we also use Ventura, QuarkXpress, and InDesign. I like InDesign a lot better; in the Ventura cases we are pouring things from a database into a Ventura template. We have a fairly old version of Quark that I don’t use much. We have a couple of others, for highly specialized uses, that I’ve never used.
*Note that I think InDesign would do 1500 footnotes, but sometimes the conversion from WP is rough and we would, for instance, convert it from WP to Word before pouring it into InDesign, if that makes sense.