Sometimes we fail to notice things right beneath our nose. And in case of document preparation, people often don't utilise the features of their tools well. Simple techniques like using numbered lists are often not used --
numbers are manually entered after hitting the tab key.
What are the tools available to prepare a good document?
Command line/non-WYSIWYG tools
- TeX/LaTex
- ConteXt
- Lout
The above software needs the user to learn some sort of control
code. You have to know exactly what you want, and define it using the
language. (La)TeX has a has a lot of documentation and support from
many universities like Cambridge and publishers like Springer. I have
at least two books in my bookshefl which have been typeset using LaTeX.
ConTeXt is based on TeX and provides a single package that can do
almost any typesetting including interactive pdfs. This is not the case
with LaTeX where you use packages to add functionality.
Lout isn't all that common but packs a lot of functionality in a small
program. It can do a lot of neat stuff, like boxes over and above
providing features enough to typeset basic documents. Its syntax is a
bit different from (La)TeX and uses the '@' symbol to denote the
beginning of a command which looks a little messy.
There are numerous instances of people mentioning these tools as old,
outdated, and difficult to use. And to be quite frank, they are
intimidating to a new user who seeks to use the mouse rather than the
keyboard, and draw and visualise while creating.
WYSIWYG software
There is only one DTP application for typesetting and document layout:
Scribus.
Although Scribus has received a lot of possitive reviews, I find that
the software tends to be sluggish and not so easy to use. It has a
decent feature set which is capable of layout of most documents.
Someone who needs to layout a newspaper or a booklet may do well with
Scribus.
Then come the word processing software applications. Abiword and
OpenOffice writer are a natural cross platform choice. Infact, all of
the software mentioned in this post are crossplatform, i.e. they run on Windows,
Linux and OS X.
Abiword is ideal when you have less complexity and need something small
and quick. OpenOffice does a good job in the heavy-weight category.
OpenOffice Writer can be used well to provide good looking documents if
the correct options are set but can look quite bad when wrongly used.
Although some features of typesetting like ligatures, true small-caps and opentype features are not available in word processors, there are some interesting techniques to make OpenOffice writer produce
documents similar to LaTeX by setting larger margins,
hyphenation, font choices, and more, which I hope to explore in depth.
A software worth a mention which provides the power of LaTeX to the average Joe is
LyX.
Although it is not really WYSIWYG, it comes very close and can be used
to typset simple articles to long books.
P.S. I'm not going to write on Docbook and other XML based options.
