[Scribus] Book length projects.

[John R. Culleton]

On Thursday 26 April 2007 07:41, Gregory Pittman wrote:
> Jason Champion wrote:
>
>
> The main question comes down to, what is Latex lacking? Admittedly
> it's not perfect, it has its issues, but for handling
> bibliographies, TOC, indexes, headings and subheadings, all of this
> is built-in and working well.
>
> Greg
>
TeX has variants other than LaTeX. I use Context and plain pdftex. I 
don't use LaTeX.

In plain TeX I use the stand alone program Makeindex, part of the TeX 
dstro. The indexable terms are tagged in typical TeX fashion in the 
body of the text. Remember TeX is not WYSIWYG. The first TeX pass 
generates a file e.g., foo.idx, which contains the raw data of index 
items with their page numbers. Then Makeindex is run, which sorts and 
summarizes the items, adds headings for letter groups, and creates a 
file e.g., foo.ind. 

The next TeX pass incidentally creates another foo.idx file (ignored) 
but the  purpose of this run is to import the foo.ind file and 
typeset the index.  

I mention this because most of the heavy lifting on index creation has 
been done already by the creators of Makeindex.  The tricky part 
becomes the tagging of the terms in a way that won't upset the 
layout.  Scribus is however an interactive and not a batch program.

I can live without indexing and even TOC generation, which can be done 
manually. But good paragraph layout and decent hyphenation are 
essentials. 

Any hints on how to use the existent paragraph style facility etc. 
effectively  would be welcome.  

Why bother with Scribus for books? Well Scribus is ahead in certain 
prepress areas, such as color management, spot color and so on. It is 
already my weapon of choice for laying out covers.  Can't wait for 
the next release! 

 
-- 
John Culleton
Able Indexing and Typesetting
Precision typesetting (tm) at reasonable cost.
Satisfaction guaranteed. 
http://wexfordpress.com