General ⇒ Typesetting Novel with LaTeX

[shadoweye]

First of all, let me introduce myself, I work in publishing company which publishes book, mainly fiction (novel). My job is to typeset manuscript given by author into a printable format.

Weeks ago I stumbled upon LaTeX, and started learning it. Let's say I've mastered the basic of it and a few formatting tricks. Then I consider a possibility of using LaTeX to replace the current software I use to typeset. (of course it's still a faraway dream, maybe someday when I got real proficient).

And for my learning purpose here are my questions:
1. In regards for typesetting novel which documentclasses, and/or packages is the best suited?
2. Sometimes I encounter a case where I should put an illustration inside a novel (i.e. a map) rectoverso (the picture takes two pages next to each other, so if the book is opened flat you'll see the whole image). Can LaTeX handle this? If so, could you please provide me with some code examples?

Thanks for your answer.

EDIT
Question 1 answered by Montag
Question 2 answered by localghost here.
Problem Solved

[Montag]

Hello shadoweye, welcome aboard.

And for my learning purpose here are my questions:
1. In regards for typesetting novel which documentclasses, and/or packages is the best suited?

In my experience, each to his own. :/
There are many, many classes. The most common are from the KOMA-package. There "seems" to be the rule that if you have document that will contain more than 20 pages, use scrreprt, when more than 50 to 60 pages, scrbook is advisable. But as everyone has certainly made different experiences, I can say that scrreprt also works for a document not in the typical a4 format and for a document bigger than 60 pages.
From what I've read sometimes, also quite common is the documentclass memoir among authors ... but then there might also be some specific classes for your purpose.

I guess for your purpose, if you use pdftex, microtype is an advisable package.

[shadoweye]

@Montag
Thanks for your suggestion, I will try to read KOMA's manual and compare it with memoir (which I'm currently reading ). I found microtype interesting too.
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Okay then, only my second question left unanswered... maybe I should create another thread on a more suitable SF (Graphics, Figures and Tables) so that my problem will get better attention.