General ⇒ Typesetting an illustrated Book

[andrey_p]

Hi all,

I'm working on an illustrated novel (predominantly text wrapped around images, in an A5 booklet). I've been reading up on TeX and LaTeX and I'm tempted to try something of the type - but I'm concerned it could be a completely inappropriate tool for the job. I'm hoping you guys, who have used it a lot already, could tell me if I'm headed in a wrong direction.

A bit of background: I work as a web developer by day, and this is a side project I've had on and off for the past year or so. I've been using Scribus to lay it out, but the workflow has seemed clunky and inefficient, especially when it comes to making very small edits to the text. I've been thinking a text-only layout tool would allow me to streamline the process and get all sorts of nerdy benefits: I'd be able to do all the work from Vim, use Git to version control, and so on.

Some specific concerns I've got are:

• It needs to output to an A5 PDF that self-publish printers (who may or may not know what LaTeX is) can work with.
• I'll need full control over where images are positioned - which page they are on, and where they are on the page.
• I'll need full control over typeface choice.
• XCF image support. I'm using Gimp to draw the images, and they are created in parallel with the text/layout - it would be good to not have to export them again and again as I'm retouching them.

What do you think? Should I stick to Scribus, or should I switch to LaTeX or something similar? If the latter, what sort of distribution/variant would you recommend?

Thank you for your help!
Andrey

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi Andrey,

welcome to the board!

So you already know some benefits, great! So I will comment on your concerns:

• LaTeX can generate standard PDF, there are packages for crop marks if required by printers.
• You can have full control. The default behavior of LaTeX is that it positions the images in a meaningful way to get good page breaks, but you can adjust this via options (such as floating to top, to bottom) and parameters (such as how many images on a page), you can restrict ranges to float (\FloatBarrier of the placeins package), you can fix positions (H option of the float package, or better don't use a figure environment then), or position wherever you want using relative or absolute coordinates (packages atbegshi, everyshi, textpos, eso-pic, TikZ). You can wrap text around images.
• XeLaTeX offers great font support.
• You can use XCF with on-the-fly conversion, via a filter with \DeclareGraphicsRule, using command-line (batch) conversion of GIMP or Imagemagick, for example.

Stefan

[andrey_p]

This is excellent, thank you.

I've just downloaded XeLaTeX and I'll start tinkering with it now.