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Programs
Copyright 1997-2002, Virginia Lawrence
This section discusses the software programs available on either the PC in Windows or the Macintosh. Obviously, you have a large selection of programs for use in producing your book. This section discusses only a few of the best, well-known programs.
Word Processing
Microsoft Word for Macintosh or Microsoft Word for Windows will provide all of the word processing features that you need. Word performs many tasks extremely well, but it fails in several areas when creating a complex book.
1.
The Master Document works beautifully to create table of contents and index for a short, simple document such as a booklet. As soon as a document includes a large number of large files, the Master Document falls apart, leaving the user wondering where he went wrong. It’s possible to use work-arounds, but time spent figuring out ways to trick Word could be better applied to actually producing your book.
2.
When you are desktop publishing a right-justified book, Word has a major failing. Word makes it difficult to adjust the space between letters within words in a line of type. This means that you will occasionally have very strange-looking lines with large spaces between the words.
True desktop publishing (DTP) programs such as Quark Express and PageMaker do a much better job. A desktop publishing program automatically adjusts not only the space between words, but also the space between letters in the words. Such a program also offers you kerning, a manual way to adjust space between letters or words. Finally, desktop-publishing programs allow tracking, a way of squeezing everything together a little tighter or loosening up a line of text. Word will let you manipulate the spaces between letters, but the effort is far greater than the easy steps in a true desktop publishing program, and the result is not particularly pleasing.
You may have no interest in learning the language of typesetting or how to kern letters and manually adjust tracking. If that is the case, you can simply not use the more advanced manual typesetting capabilities in desktop-publishing programs. Even if you ignore the more technical options, desktop-published pages created with the automatic settings will make your final book look more professional than a book created with Word.
3.
Another problem with Word is the way it handles graphics. Compared to DTP programs, Word gives you fewer options for manipulating graphics, so you have fewer graphics tools within the program. This means that you must take the original graphic file into a graphics program, manipulate the graphic, then insert back into Word. This lack of graphics tools increases the importance of the next Word limitation.
Word retains some of the information on each graphic, even after you have deleted the graphic! Thus, your file gets bigger with every graphic change. This would not cause problems in a chapter with few graphics changes. However, if you are dealing with graphics which are being continually re-created, your chapter can become very large due to the detritus of removed graphics. (This problem may be unique to software manuals, since screenshots are added and replaced frequently during the creation of the manual.)
If you love Word and plan to use it anyway, you should plan a book with wide pages and a few, final graphics. Wide pages will minimize the word spacing problem. Another alternative would be to left-justify your text. Neither solution is ideal, but if you are familiar with Word, and do not want to switch programs, you can use Word.
Particularly when you are a fast typist, Word does have a place on your hard drive, along with your desktop-publishing program. Fast touch-typists have found the desktop-publishing programs too slow to keep up with their typing. If you fall into this category, you will be much happier typing your book in Word, then transferring the text later to your desktop publishing program. The transfer is a simple matter on the Mac or in Windows.
If you are a moderate or slow typist, you will be happy with entering your text directly into the desktop-publishing program. You won’t have the bother of transferring the text, and you can see your book taking shape as you enter the text.
Desktop Publishing
The desktop publishing giants are PageMaker, QuarkXPress, and FrameMaker. I recommend that you choose one of the top three, rather than any of the less professional desktop-publishing programs. Using any one of the top three desktop publishing programs, you can easily create the Adobe Acrobat PDF files you need to send to the printer. In fact, at least PageMaker includes a version of Adobe Acrobat so that you can create PDF files without purchasing a full version of the Adobe Acrobat software.