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What sotware do people use to design book layouts?
Lux
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
As in chapters, inlets, etc. What is the typical professional software? And are there free alternatives?
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InDesign and Quark are the 2 "easily" available consumer standards (as in, you could go out to the store and buy them tomorrow). Some stuff is also done in Illustrator too (for people that like doing stuff the hard way, or cant get over pagemaker single-page-at-a-time style layout).
There are lots of others out there that are more "professional" though (as in meant for quick, easy, high volume, high quality work). A few examples off the top of my head would be Advent 3B2, Datalogics Pager and XYVision. Theres also numerous custom applications that publishing companies created inhouse for quick layout of easy work (text, page numbers and maybe a heading and a table of contents). Theres also TeX/LaTex, but as far as im aware it isnt used much outside of academia, aside from some software (3B2 in particular) being able to parse some of the coding (I could be wrong but ive never heard of any company that uses TeX/LaTex solely).
And believe it or not some companys actually use Microsoft Word, but its generally not worth the time it takes to create professional looking documents if youre going to be doing it on a daily basis (a 100+ page document can take on the order of days of manhours to layout depending on style and the strictness of adherence, where as most of these other programs you can take the time it would take to do it in word and cut it in half, at least).
And then of course you have stuff thats not even software, like phototypesetting, which believe it or not, still exists, like with paste up and film and everything, although its fairly rare now.
What are you trying to do exactly? That will give a better idea of what exactly you need to accomplish it.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typesetting#SGML_and_XML_systems
Some tools are better for typesetting very large documents while most will handle chapters, tocs, images; the basics for creating any book. Similarly, for many of these tools people do not actually write using them, because they're not word processors; they're typesetting/layout tools. You could write a book in InDesign but it would be a miserable experience.