Programs

This section discusses mostly 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.

The Master Document works beautifully to create the table of contents and index for a short, simple document. As soon as a document includes a large number of large files, however, 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.

When you are desktop publishing a right-justified book with narrow columns of text, 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.

In contrast, 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. Word lets you adjust spaces between the letters of words, but Word makes it very difficult to do.

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.

Another problem with Word is the way it handles graphics. 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. This would not cause problems in a chapter with few graphics changes. However, a chapter can become very large when it contains graphics which are being continually re-created. This problem may be unique to software manuals, where the writers must continually update the software screen graphics..

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.

If you are a fast typist, Word does have a place on your hard drive, along with your desktop-publishing program. Fast touch-typists often find 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.

Desktop Publishing

The desktop publishing giants are PageMaker, QuarkXPress, and FrameMaker. If you are ready to purchase a desktop-publishing program, I recommend that you choose one of the top three, rather than any of the less professional desktop-publishing programs.

PageMaker

PageMaker was the first commercially viable desktop publishing program. It was a very exciting program in the late 80's, but, in my opinion, PageMaker has fallen behind its competitors.

I find PageMaker clunky and harder to use than Quark or Frame. What do I mean by clunky? PageMaker uses three different modes, for example, and you can use the spellchecker in only one of those modes.

You should note that Aldus now owns both PageMaker and FrameMaker, so the desktop-publishing situation may change drastically in the next year.

PageMaker costs about $460 for Windows and $550 for Mac.

QuarkXpress

QuarkXPress will do nearly everything that you want in desktop publishing. It has style sheets and accepts style sheets from Word. The program is wonderful with graphics, allowing you to customize them and do color separations. QuarkXpress allows kerning and tracking. It also provides good graphics capabilities.

Quark does not create an acceptable table of contents or an index. If you need either of those, you can purchase an inexpensive Xtension called IndeXtension from the independent publisher listed under IndeXtension in Appendix A (to appear later.) The IndeXtension will help, but the resulting index is still not as good as the index you can create with Word for a Word document. For example, Word lets you tag a word for the index, then type in any changes in the index entry dialog box. In contrast, IndeXtension indexes either all words occurring with a specified frequency, or words in your specified word list. Both IndeXtension methods can produce an index containing incorrect references. Also, the index in Quark requires a lot of manual labor from you. If the index for your book must be extensive, you should choose FrameMaker.

QuarkXpress 3.3 costs $600 for Mac or Windows, $680 on CD for Power Mac.

FrameMaker

FrameMaker will do nearly everything that you want in desktop publishing. FrameMaker, alone of the top three, provides an easy way to create a high quality table of contents and an index. Frame Maker allows kerning, tracking, and sophisticated graphics. In addition, it creates HTML files.

FrameMaker also includes a simple method for creating scientific equations and including them in your document. Most of you reading this will have no equations in your books. Those who do have equations, however, should definitely choose FrameMaker.

FrameMaker costs about $500 for Mac or Windows.

Fonts for Desktop Publishing

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