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Comment by blue1 | Hacker News Reader

It's sad that a complete structure writing/publishing workflow is still so hard. XSL-FO is awkward and limited, and will probably remain so. TeX is not design-friendly. On the other side, InDesign is mostly visual only. Framemaker seems to be only serious tool but it's very expensive.

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I was a devoted FrameMaker user until Adobe killed the Mac product. I used to have to do fairly complicated legal documents, and it was worth every penny. Plus, it was a very good word processor--you never had to leave the program to edit text. So I used it for everything I had to write.

A book like this could have been handled fairly easily in FrameMaker, but sadly Adobe has decided to position in it to be only for large enterprise shops running Windows. They're probably (rightfully) afraid it would cannabalize InDesign sales if they made it more accessible.

I have used it in 1992 on Sun stations. It was a delight. I am pretty sure it would gain a lot of attraction if they open sourced it.

Hm. I never heard of FrameMaker before, but their 2015 release is available at $29.99/month, which is hardly "positioned only for large enterprises".

Yeah, just out of curiosity I looked at what the current deal was, and that might almost be reasonable if a) I were still going to be using it every day and b) there were still a Mac/Linux version. I wouldn't do a subscription deal it just for personal use, but that's a different issue. But 'positioning' is partly a marketing thing. Not having a Mac version clearly separates the product from Indesign for a lot of users.

I keep an eye on the Scribus project from time to time. Who knows, maybe someday it can compete.

https://www.scribus.net/

What about Apple Pages? I find that very good and easy to deal with typesetting. But I am no expert in the field so it might have sever weaknesses I am not aware of. Anyway I like that it seems to have been designed with layout in mind from the start unlike MS Word e.g. where doing layout has never felt natural.

Typesetting isn't the same as word processing, you need a lot more power than something like Pages gives you.

For example, our book is 308,000 words and 32 chapters. By the time it's done it'll probably be ~310-325k plus index. LaTeX means I can change one line in the header and have the build completely re-typeset the book according to those parameters programmatically, and it does a _very_ good job.

Re: index - how do you generate an index with Apple Pages? And I don't mean concordance, I mean a proper index. With LaTeX it's...programmatic. We provide the metadata in the form of `\index{blah}`, it generates the index for us.

It's extremely hard to find anything that's competitive on all these fronts and which is also open source. LaTeX is pretty much it, everything else is focused only on basic formatting & presentation and hasn't even gotten to a proper typesetting algorithm.

A word processor is a totally different beast from type setting.

https://programmingforresearch.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/word...

Though people have been trying to solve this in Word and templates but those still fail at technical books still IMHO.

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