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You can do it that way, but using something that's made for the job makes life a lot easier. Between Scrivener for writing and Vellum for compiling to ebook formats there's no reason to spend your time futzing around. If you want to format for print, either pay someone or learn InDesign because nice print layout is tougher than it appears.

Then again, a lot of the self-pub strategy these days is specifically geared around getting as much out as quickly as possible, so that's not necessarily an invalid approach.

In any case, I prefer to spend most of my time writing rather than screwing about with tooling.

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> learn InDesign

Ahem, or learn the open-source Tex/Latex, from which InDesign took inspiration. If you can format a beautiful scientific/mathematical textbook for print using Tex, you can format anything. And Pandoc is a great adjunct.

But yes, it's not for people who wish to avoid screwing around with tooling. It's for perfectionists who want absolute control over layout/notation.

Writing a novel in LaTeX is not the best approach if you're looking to write a lot of text and don't have to worry about notation. But Neil Stephenson famously wrote Cryptonomicon in Emacs and LaTeX, so hey, it works for some people.

Edited to add that InDesign is much easier for back matter, front matter, laying out images, covers, etc. . . . And that's coming from someone who LOVES LaTeX. I set my old software company with some sweet templates and all of our proposals were typeset in LaTeX. It was awesome. But if you're writing a novel for print I really wouldn't recommend it.

I agree that writing large volumes of text in LaTeX is cumbersome, and the same goes for text that includes many code samples. \begin{verbatim}...\end{verbatim} is just too verbose, and \verb|...| for inline code is also too verbose to my taste.

So right now I'm writing my book in Markdown, and put it on leanpub for now (https://leanpub.com/deploy).

For print, I'll either figure out a way to get a PDF formatted as I want it from leanpub, or use pandoc to create the markdown to LaTeX, and then write a custom template with all the customization.

But this is something that I won't worry too much about until the manuscript is really finished.

For code samples I prefer to have them in separate files and include them so it's just one command that imports them and formats them.

I wrote both my Master's and Ph.D. theses in LaTeX and found it much better than the alternatives. With Markdown I'd be resorting to falling back on LaTeX anyway and many of the additional Markdown features weren't available when I wrote them.

I had a predefined document class for my Master's but the university changed the guidelines by the time of my Ph.D. so I used the Memoir document class and that had a lot of flexibility and I didn't have to include many other packages to format things. I basically set up the format once at the beginning, checked against the guidelines once at the end and that was it.

I don't think you are supposed to write in LaTex anymore than you are supposed to write in InDesign

Spoken like someone who has never encountered `auctex-mode`

... anymore than you are supposed to write in HTML?

FrameMaker would be even better than InDesign for creating books--it has better support for managing book structure, and has decent word-processing facilities--it's a much better 'all-in-one' tool.

I wrote my Ph.D. thesis in FrameMaker on a Mac. Then Adobe went and discontinued it on the Mac, which was much lamented. So now I write stuff in LaTeX instead.

Respectfully, I disagree, but everyone has their favorite tools and procedures. I wrote a 350 page book [1] of mostly text with 500 references, initial quotations at the front of chapters, and illustrations. LaTeX was exactly what I needed [2], and the greatest pleasure of that experience was being able to choose my own tools instead of being mandated by some publisher to submit everything in Word. LaTeX did just fine with front and back matter; CTAN had examples of all this stuff [3] and it was well organized so required little searching. My work flow was basically emacs/auctex, some scripts to convert TeX to HTML and eventually XHTML, and Calibre and Sigil for the final touches. Working on a plain text format made for easy archiving, diffing, and compression. Can't imagine using something that requires and internet connection to work, like Google Docs (which I like, on the other hand, for other use cases).

Happy to offer the epub or mobi to anyone who wants it, and the LaTeX source if you're curious how I made it work. Email my user name at gmail.com. [1] http://dictatorshandbook.net [2] http://therandymon.com/index.php?/categories/2-Tech/P2.html [3] http://ctan.org

> from which InDesign took inspiration

Do you have a source? InDesign is much, much more than Latex, and certainly not just a derivative - though your post implies just that. Having spent many hobby-years in InDesign laying out newspaper spreads, magazines, covers, I'd argue that it has a fundamentally different, richer, use case, and is incomparable (unless you're just talking about technical documents).

> Do you have a source?

I don't have the source now, and I may be mistaken. I thought I remembered reading somewhere that InDesign's creators drew significant inspiration from Tex/LaTeX, but I can no longer find the original source. Perhaps I was thinking about QuarkXPress. I did not mean to imply it was a direct derivative. InDesign was openly created to compete with Quark, so its feature set was much more in line with Quark than with Tex.

I completely agree that LaTeX is not ideal for designing magazines (although it's used by some academic journals), and its support for cover layout could be better (indeed, it took me longer than it should have to create a fairly simple book cover with Latex just last week).

But as a typesetting system, it's great, and works great for books.

LaTeX is purely for text/formula/equation-heavy academic publishing. It was created for that purpose by Lesley Lamport.

ConTeXt - http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page (an open source derivating of TeX) developed and supported commercially by Pragama - http://www.pragma-ade.com/ is what you should use for typesetting magazines etc.,

ConTeXt gives you complete artistic and layout control. While it is used heavily for non-technical publishing, people like Sanjoy Mahajan have used ConTeXt for publishing Math books like - "Street Fighting Mathematics" https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/street-fighting-mathematics

See resulting PDF: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/free_dow...

If you have a particular layout in mind, then InDesign takes about 1/10 of the time to learn as it would take to achieve mastery of e.g. the memoir package in TeX.

TeX's not the right tool if you need immediate, precise, flexible control over page layout.

Make life easy on yourself. Learn InDesign.

InDesign did take inspiration from TeX in the layout and hyphenation algorithms, but that doesn't make them totally equivalent.

Although TeX does produce very good output InDesign is much better at eliminating rivers as it has an idea of the shape of the glyphs. I've seen stuff on doing this in TeX, but it was a feedback loop of producing the output, analysing it, and then tweaking the input to fix the problem.

InDesign was the successor to PageMaker and a result of a strategy to outcompete Quark Xpress. I don't think it took much inspiration from TeX/LaTeX, given that it's a WYSIWYG tool with no markup language underneath.

Why so condescending? Reading your comment, after reading both of the author's posts on his methodology, I take that his approach might not be everybody's, but I took a lot more from his writing, then from your writing.

You tell the author, not explicitly but non the less, that his method sucks and he is an idiot for not using "the right" (TM) tools. Using your method is ok - for you. Using his method is ok - for him. His is not more right or less right. Both of you got your work done and your book(s) published.

> no reason to spend your time futzing around

Well for some it is also the process that counts. And the ability to get stuff done without proprietary software.

On a final note: Maybe I just misread your tone (at least, it's the internet) - maybe you weren't so a stuck up. Or didn't mean to be.

Well I was and I wasn't. I certainly don't begrudge a person for getting really involved with their tools. Depends on what your goals are. If it's productivity and a nice finished product then the tools he was using are likely not the best for the job, even if they are fun. No way to know for sure, but if I was handing out advice I would absolutely NOT suggest people use the tooling he used, even for developers.

I'm doing this whole thing for pleasure, and for me f*cking around with the tooling was just as fun as writing the novel :D

Ha! Then more power to you :)

My point with this was from a workaday aspect. I both understand and respect getting nerdy about the tooling. And congrats, the first novel is the hardest.

I use TROFF and friends for layout and Ghostscript for generating PDF. No screwing around with a stupid GUI. :)

Once you have a collection of macros set up, it's a natural process and allows you to focus on writing entirely.

YMMV, of course.

Depending on what you're doing, LaTeX may be a better option. But if troff works for you, I'm not complaining.

I always thought TeX and friends had much prettier output than roff-family output and my professors always appreciated a TeX formatted paper.

But for rapid documentation writing I found roff perfectly acceptable. It worked for Bell Labs, so why not? In fact for a while I actually published my resume in man format after slightly tweaking the an macros. Very few people got the joke and most just asked if I could e-mail a copy in Word format.

If a sysadmin / engineer / devops dude showed up today at my door with his resume in -man format I'd think it was cool.

The fact that Scrivener is now available on the iPad and Literature and Latte abandoned Linux makes an iPad Pro a tempting platform. But frankly there's nothing wrong with using a unix distribution on a Chromebook or droplet via ssh and roff to author a book from start to finish. And it would be far cheaper than an iPad Pro.

> InDesign

A free software alternative(?) is Scribus. It doesn't nearly have as many features as InDesign but it is one of the few free software implementations of a desktop publishing programme.

And the only way to design large-scale posters on Linux without going insane. Incredible tool!

If you ever need to produce more uncommon layouts, try http://www.laidout.org/

Thanks, that is one truly unknown tool. Not very intuitive but I will manage.

The last time I tried Scribus it seemed very limited--slow and unable to deal with large files. Is it any better now?

Well...tbh this seems far more just like a cheap way of promoting the novel than a way to actually provide useful information

The OA specified the software used and the way that the tools were chained together, and he mentioned the somewhat kludgy workround for getting the chapter headings vertically centred on the page.

I also found his other page linked from the OA about the actual writing process itself of interest. Specifically the way he 'reverse engineered' the plots of various popular novels by deciding on some common headings/categories and summarising each of the novels under those headings in a spreadsheet.

What 'useful information' do you find to be missing?

I agree, I found both articles very interesting in terms of both writing workflow and self-publishing workflow.

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