[scribus] Using Scribus for novels and short stories

Randolph Bentson bentson at holmsjoen.com
Thu Jan 6 20:31:43 CET 2011


On Thu, Jan 06, 2011 at 10:16:31AM -0800, John Jason Jordan wrote:
... 
> My real beef with the whole TeX family is the philosophy. They were
> designed initially for academic papers, e.g., dissertations and theses,
> where the formatting is as important as what you say. (Don't get me
> started on the insanity of universities.)
...

To set the story straight: Don Knuth found that getting his books
published incurred a significant typesetting surcharge becase they
were heavy in mathematical notation. He also found that when his
manuscripts went through this typesetting process for each new
edition, he'd find a new set of errors. He created TeX to avoid
the cost, to have control over the special notations, and so that
errors occurred only where he blundered.

His was not the first utility to transform manuscript text to camera
ready copy. The 1960's "runoff" utility is the ancestor of a long
line of such programs, with "groff" as the most recent and widely
distributed version.

BTW, I've used TeX and Scribus each to typeset a book. In the latter
case, my programming background led me to use a script to extract the
source from special purpose typsetting notation in a text manuscript.

-- 
Randolph Bentson
bentson at holmsjoen.com



More information about the scribus mailing list