<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:bookman old style, new york, times, serif;font-size:14pt"><DIV>Dear Rob,<BR></DIV>
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<DIV style="FONT-FAMILY: bookman old style, new york, times, serif; FONT-SIZE: 14pt">Thank you for your response. My novel is 60,000 words long, split into 20 chapters. It was written and formatted in Times New Roman 12 using Microsoft Word XP. I want to:</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT-FAMILY: bookman old style, new york, times, serif; FONT-SIZE: 14pt">Transfer it into Scribus using OpenOffice to preserve the formatting.</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT-FAMILY: bookman old style, new york, times, serif; FONT-SIZE: 14pt">Choose a font which will avoid kerning issues as much as possible, since I read that Times New Roman has kerning problems.</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT-FAMILY: bookman old style, new york, times, serif; FONT-SIZE: 14pt">Create possibly two Master Pages, one for the first page of each chapter, the other (with page numbers and header) for subsequent pages. </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT-FAMILY: bookman old style, new york, times, serif; FONT-SIZE: 14pt">I presume that since formatting has been preserved to some extent, I will not have a great deal of editing to do, apart for attending to widows and orphans.</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT-FAMILY: bookman old style, new york, times, serif; FONT-SIZE: 14pt">Produce a cover with a coloured photograph.</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT-FAMILY: bookman old style, new york, times, serif; FONT-SIZE: 14pt">Produce a PDF file of single pages for printing. </DIV>
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<DIV style="FONT-FAMILY: bookman old style, new york, times, serif; FONT-SIZE: 14pt">You mention LaTex, but I have already purchased the Scribus manual, and have been experimenting with portions of text transferred from my Word files.</DIV>
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<DIV style="FONT-FAMILY: bookman old style, new york, times, serif; FONT-SIZE: 14pt">I appreciate your help.</DIV>
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<DIV style="FONT-FAMILY: bookman old style, new york, times, serif; FONT-SIZE: 14pt">Regards,</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT-FAMILY: bookman old style, new york, times, serif; FONT-SIZE: 14pt">Scottie</DIV>
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<B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">From:</SPAN></B> Rob Oakes <lyx-devel@oak-tree.us><BR><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">To:</SPAN></B> Scribus User Mailing List <scribus@lists.scribus.info><BR><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Sent:</SPAN></B> Wednesday, 5 January, 2011 16:52:19<BR><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Subject:</SPAN></B> Re: [scribus] Using Scribus for novels and short stories<BR></FONT><BR>Hi Scottie,<BR><BR>Could you provide a little bit more detail about the project? Does the collection also include illustrations? Is there any need for complex page layouts?<BR><BR>If not, you might be better looking at another tool for the job. While Scribus can certainly be used for novels and short story collections, if the material is mostly text, you would probably be better served using LaTeX, which in my opinion is superior for long text documents. Especially if you've made consistent use of styles. Are you
primarily concerned with paragraph and heading styles, or are there character styles as well?<BR><BR>An alternative to using pure LaTeX might be to convert the word documents to LyX, which provides a WYSIWYG wrapper that can simplify editing. Then, you can either work to create a custom style sheet or document class so that your book has a distinctive look.<BR><BR>Front matter, such as the cover, title page, and copyright page can be created using Scribus and then added to the document at compile time. This is a good route to take as creating a custom title page and cover in LaTeX can be a miserable experience.<BR><BR>I look forward to hearing more about your project.<BR><BR>Cheers,<BR><BR>Rob<BR><BR>PS, if you have access to a newer version of Word (e.g., 2010), it can save ODF documents directly (which can be converted to either LaTeX or Scribus). You may wish to save from MS Word to ODF rather than using OpenOffice to convert. I've
had some trouble with character styles being preserved correctly in OpenOffice. Saving directly from Word seems to prevent the problem.<BR>_______________________________________________<BR>scribus mailing list<BR><A href="mailto:scribus@lists.scribus.info" ymailto="mailto:scribus@lists.scribus.info">scribus@lists.scribus.info</A><BR><A href="http://lists.scribus.info/mailman/listinfo/scribus" target=_blank>http://lists.scribus.info/mailman/listinfo/scribus</A><BR></DIV></div></body></html>