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Tools & Surprises For a Tech Book Author?
Fubari writes "I have questions for those of you who have written books: what writing tools have you found helpful? I want to start my book off right (so I'm pretty sure I don't want to write it in MS Word). What has and has not worked well for you? So far I have thought of needs like chapter/section management, easy references to figures (charts, diagrams, source code), version control (check in/check out parts like chapters, figures, etc.), and index generation. I would also welcome advice about what I don't know enough to ask about. Did you encounter any surprises that you wish you had known about back when you started out?"
Save often!
On the contrary, thinking of asking slashdot surely means he's *very* qualified.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
And wise enough to know when to ask for help, something too few tech people know how to do...
You're also getting at something important: the process of copy editing/production is completely separate from actual writing. While it's entirely possible to just pull up a vi/emacs and write straight Docbook or LaTeX - and I've done it for some documents - I find it tends to have a chilling effect on both my creativity and my attention to content detail if I'm trying to think about content and presentation/formatting at the same time.
It's the same reason that brainstorming should be a totally separate process from welding your fleshed-out thoughts into professional writing. If you try and force your thoughts to be concise and professional too quickly - unless it's something you're really good at - usually you'll be filtering yourself too much to produce ANYTHING good. If you're thinking about formatting when you're editing the content, your mind is trying to do too much at once and so it does both things badly. Try to do all three at once and you'll probably be horrible at all three. Of course, there are jobs which require you to integrate several processes into one, but integration is itself a wholly separate task, and, again, it should be dealt with separately from each constituent process.
When I am responsible for the whole thing, from beginning to end, I generally only do one activity (writing a rough draft, editing the draft, and finally formatting it) on any given day, as much as time allows. And if I don't have that luxury, I run around the block or lift weights between tasks to clear my head. This singlemindedness might just be my personal quirks, but I have a job where I wear about fifteen different hats and am constantly pulled in different directions - the kind of job where "strong multitasker" would be in the requirements - and I manage it by organizing my deadlines, planning, and doing one thing at a time. Since I don't believe in multitasking (at least as most people do it - doing ten things in parallel and accomplishing little in any one area), I can't decide if this makes me a great multitasker or a horrible multitasker, but I seem to be doing alright.
Right. I used LaTeX because ... well, because I knew it mainly, and because I wanted to get words on paper rather than distract myself with layout early on.
At the end of the process I had to interact with a lot of people and Word would have made the process a hellova lot easier. At 500 odd pages, LaTeX was still taking a while (it builds the PAF by merging all of the DVIs and that takes a while) - I'm not at all convinced Word is any slower. Besides, you're going to write the book on your desktop and you're probably used to using your desktop for all sorts of fancy technical work. The kind of desktops that computer geeks use regularly are more than capable of
Also the spelling and grammar tools for Word are better than comporable tools for LaTeX. And the figure placement in LaTeX - argh! Index management wasn't bad in LaTeX either, but no better than Word. LaTeX might have nice linebreak rules, but it's perfectly happy to do a page break at a stupid place instead of trying harder to squeeze the document - I think LaTeX has stagnated while the GUI world caught up.
PS: My father swears by InDesign for this sort of stuff having migrated to it from Word. Dunno myself and I don't really care, I'm not planning on going through that again.