I want to finally start to format my many drafts of Kite & windsurfing book & safety guide. Any thoughts on which software/application to use (that is preferably free and/or common)? Word is too unstable with lots of pix and over 120 pages, Publisher doesn't seem to have a format that lends itself to "book" style layouts. Any other ideas from you computer gurus would be appreciated. Thx

Anyone who's already set up for this and wants to help me with formatting, layout, maybe for a reasonable!! fee, that would be great too

BTW I will be canvassing to fill my obvious knowledge gaps from some of you experts, looking forward to that too.

Kus, the only way Word behaves at all with figures and captions that we have found producing hundreds of reports, often >100 pages, is to create an empty table (1x2), then insert the figure into the table, create a caption normally, then move it to the lower table cell. Otherwise, Word often goes crazy, and usually at the last stages of compiling a draft. Even if you use small images with tight text wrapping, if you try and put two close together they'll end up on different pages, huge empty areas on the page, figures becoming embedded as part of a cross-reference code, total file corruption, etc etc etc. Large single page figures we produce as single documents with similar headers footers, page number, etc then print to Adobe. We leave a blank page with caption in Word for this figure so you can cross-reference and build list of figures, table of contents, etc in Word. We'll do the same for pages with smaller figures if Word starts to act up. At the end, we print the whole file to Adobe and replace the figure pages one by one. Its a pain but the only way to keep sane.

We haven't found anything that works better. The publishing software seems to handle final formatting well, but doesn't have the other features (like building lists of figures) that Word actually does do well. Other word processors have there own set of problems. I'll be watching this thread to see if anyone has better ideas!

Have a machine with LOTS of RAM does help Word.

Some of the bugs have been in Word since very very early releases, and have never been fixed though we reported them multiple times till we gave up. Each new version we hope will fix the problems, but they introduce some flashy new capability noone really needs instead of fixing the bugs.

Contrast this to the support you get from the tiny GIS company Global Mapper - people have a problem and report it in their forum, if its a software problem, 9 out of 10 times they figure out a fix and post a beta version with the fix (and all other fixes), often the same day. Everyone can just download and extract the newer/better version over the main program. Now THATS service! (and for $200 or so dollars; and it does things that you have to pay $5,000 for an extension to do in $1,200 ESRI ArcMap).

That's funny MF4, we use almost exactly the same process at our environmental consulting company. The table idea for photo and caption works well. However, I think the best idea for something that will be a book is to keep the text in Word while doing edits and keep photos to a minmum (or just use placeholders as MF4 says). Keep formatting as simple as possible until you are finished with edits. Word is great for working with text, but horrible for document design.

When all the text is done, export it and the photos, drawings and other graphics to a publishing program or a drawing program. My girlfriend builds the final product in Corel Draw when she makes brochures, but this may be too awkward for a larger document (she is working on a 40+ page one now though). I am not familiar with publishing programs programs so I can't help here.

I guess it all depends on the final destination of your book/guide. You may want to consult with a graphics design company and publisher for advice and guidelines. It may be just be easier to hire someone who has the fancy software and computing power for the final document layout.

Just a side note: if you do want to buy Corel Draw, it is cheaper to first buy Corel Graphics Suite, then buy the Corel Draw upgrade. You'll need lots of RAM and a good graphics card. Some of the brochures my gf makes are >200MB!

Your work sounds interesting. Looking forward to the final product!

I'd forgotten about CorelDraw. We do our brochures in that and actually tried a report or two a few years ago. The great thing about it is the photos stay put where you want them. Its not bad for working with text if you use the paragraph boxes, and you can link them so the text flows from one to the other seamlessly as you edit and resize them and stuff moves around fine but doesn't affect document design. Multi-page is no problem. I dunno about a whole book though, as 4J says. And it won't build tables of contents or an index for keywords like you will want in the book and which is easy in Word. I'd guess that publishers would prefer it coming in Adobe (you could create one from CorelDraw) rather than CD itself, but it probably would help to check. It would really be annoying to do an entire book layout and have the publisher ask you for plain text and separate graphic files 'cause they do all the layout anyway!

Or were you thinking of self-publishing? Some of the stuff for that is pretty impressive now, lets you do small runs in bound covers then reprint at no extra cost beyond the actual printing (I think Island Blueprint has one of these).

Hey, I hope your safety book will have very stern warnings about never ever sailing at night, especially with poor night vision and obstructions in the water, and alone, and in winter

And you've GOT to use this for your jacket photo of the author (I'm sure you thought of this already!) http://www.bigwavedave.ca/gallery/displ ... ?pos=-4207

just dont forget the floating signal helmet. thats a whole chapter right there.

I have had problems using Corel draw for files bigger than 15O MB and would likely be more trouble than it's worth for a whole book. Corel seems to fill up the temp drive quickly with large files. It is good for individual figures, and it is very easy to export as a Jpeg or PDF. I don't know much about Adobe Illustrator, although I've heard lofty claims about it being able to project ESRI shapefiles.

Tom

Thanks for your comments & emails everyone, much appreciated.

For the record the conclusion I have come to is to use Word with unformatted text for each chapter separately with placeholders for pictures. Pictures will be named in order, same chapter name with a # for order. I'll be asking for permission to use some of your amazing shots when I pick them for the chapters, photography not being my forte (not really sure yet what actually is )
The final draft will be created and layed out in Adobe InDesign. There is quite the art to layout, by the time I learn all that I'll be back to dust so I'll just pay someone for their skill.

Cheers, hopefully this will be complete before the pictures look too dated and highrises have been constructed in Jordan River with the beach halfway up the hill

Nice job, Kus. I'm late weighing in...but I would do exactly what you've chosen. Text in word, followed by final layout in InDesign. An awesome program for page layout and perfect for the application - creating books. Good luck!!

I don't know if you have purchased your indesign yet but Indesign CS3 is coming out at the end of this month. I hear there are fantastic performance gains over CS2. I use CS2 to make yearbooks and it is used for magazines, newspapers and more. I don't use word. I just use indesign because it has spell check as well.