Type and Design Tips for self- and small publishers POST #2

Okay, so you’ve decided you’re going to design and typeset your own book.

The first thing to note is that I have never come up with a way around needing either Quark Xpress or Adobe InDesign. Anyone who says you can do perfectly good, professional page layout in Microsoft Word is either lying, ignorant, or a Microsoft shill of some kind. (The same goes for OpenOffice and the Word clones out there. They’re very sophisticated, but they’re NOT PAGE LAYOUT SOFTWARE. And yes, you can drive a nail into a board using the handle of a screwdriver, but why would you want to?)

I’ve been using Quark for about 17 years now, and I’ve tried to make the switch to InDesign twice, and ended up back at Quark both times. But both programs have the powerful ability to make the specific adjustments necessary for professional typesetting that Word and other word processors don’t.

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Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.