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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?"
I've also been learning LyX and it's a WYSIWYM(ean) front-end for LaTeX. I suggest you try it.
I started writing books (novels and textbooks) when all I had was a typewriter. Since then using XyWrite and now Word, I've written fifty or so books. Given that experience, I would say that while the things you list would sometimes be nice to have, none are essential. Take notes as necessary and maintain tiered backups (today, yesterday, last week, last month), and you should be fine. At the moment I'm working on a book on 3D printing (Futurist article available below). Initially, I gave each chapter its own file. As the chapters approached final form, I merged all into a single file, which is now (thanks to illos) over 16Meg. Tom Easton http://www.sff.net/people/teaston/
I have written one book (over 750 pages), entirely in OpenOffice.
I found it very well equipped for all the tasks I needed, plus export to PDF worked like charm. As a metter of fact it was also edited in OO, and pdf was sent straight to printing.
It can make index, table of contents, and some other things You will find usable. For example I linked over 200 images in text and not once did OO lose track of size, position or other thing in entire book.
On the other hand, I could not hold the document in MS Word to have same number of pages on several computers, it just re-numerated pages each time differently, moved images and did other nasty things, especially after thing got bigger (over 80 pages).
Besides LaTeX, I really can't think of something better than OpenOffice.
Doing a good job is like spilling coffee on a dark suit, you feel warm all over, but nobody notices.
I wish I'd known I had chosen the wrong publisher.
I published a book with SAMS (an imprint of Macmillan Computer Publishing, which is not related to the British publisher called Macmillan). I was working with some half a dozen other authors and only needed to complete a couple of chapters (the page production rate that Que require from authors is so huge that I'm sure I could not have achieved that as a sole author, at least not if I wanted to take the time to check the copy I was submitting).
The basic problem was that MCP's editors (I guess copy editors initially) loaded the text I gave them into Microsoft Word (I assume, I can't remember if they confirmed this). It immediately "corrected" all the punctuation. Since the book was about Unix, there was an abundance of single and double quotes, backticks, and so forth. They all got totally screwed up. On proof reading, I spotted these, fixed them and sent the corrected text back. Then of course they loaded the text into Word again and broke everything a second time.
The whole experience was frustrating and I was left with an author credit on a portion of a book that was riddled with stupid errors. I am embarrassed to have been associated with such a farce of an attempt at a technical book. I will never again work with any publisher in that group.
I should disclose that following publication, I had other difficulties with MCP in that they published the text a second time in another book under their Que imprint, without consulting me or paying me. They rectified that when I complained, though I didn't know to do so until I noticed my text in a book I browsed in a bookshop. So there is some subsequent bad feeling on my part, so take it as read that you're not getting a dispassionate report here. Mind you, the book was published ten years ago this year, so I've calmed down a bit now.
The list of publishers I'd consider collaborating with now is much, much shorter - only about four publishers (plus any others I don't know about - and I'm sure there are many - who will accept camera-ready copy).
Sucks, but there it is.
I wouldn't say "sucks", but I work on the editing and layout end of the process. Having an author kibitzing on the layout is what sucks. What we need from the author is a functional layout: so we know what level of heading is intended; not "18 point bold Arial".
I've worked on hundreds of books and I cannot recall ANY authors, including University professors, who had a clue about how to use their tools of choice (as they all had written their manuscripts before bothering to consult the publisher), they all used Word, and most of them like a typewriter. None had a clue what a "style" was or how to use it consistently. You were likely to find paragraphs of body text styled as "Heading 1", reformatted to be 12 point Times. I normally spent half a day cleaning up crap like that before I could export the file out of Word and start the actual layout.
The ones who did think they knew about layout were even worse though. They try to tell me that "Arial is a great body text", "two spaces are required after a full stop", "underlining is how I want to emphasise", "the text should be at least 14 points to make it easy to read", "my name should be bigger", etc, etc. If you don't know why this kind of thing causes DTP people to grind their teeth, just take my word for it. You do require a degree of stubborn egomania to get a book written and published, but you also have to know when to take advice from people who have more experience.
I have two books, one in its second edition and one in its first. Both have lots of equations. I insisted on using LaTeX and having the books typeset in LaTeX, the publisher agreed, and it's one of the best decisions I've ever made.
Here is why I'm happy: THE EQUATIONS IN THE PAGE PROOFS ARE THE SAME AS THE EQUATIONS IN MY ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT. I can't tell you how important that is. Most editors and proofreaders do not have a clue about technical material. If you write in Word or some other format that is "rekeyed" by the publisher, I guarantee that by the time you get to page proofs, many of your equations will be unrecognizable, and you will go through hell trying to straighten things out. The publishers insist that they can avoid this problem, but friends who are authors and who did not use LaTeX assure me that the publishers mess things up. In my case, various things were fouled up (graph legends for example were frequently reversed because the graphs had been redrawn), but not the equations.
Lots of folks here are saying to use what the publisher tells you to use, they have a system, etc. I had five publishing houses (three commercial and two university) offer me a contract, and all agreed to produce the book in LaTeX. They just contract out the compositing. this may vary by publisher, but in my case, it was not a big deal. YMMV.