Book layout starting from scratch?

January 20, 2023 8:37 AM

I am taking on the layout (and some editing) of an 80-page letter-sized book, including text, pictures, some custom design elements, and ads. Unfortunately, the most experience I have with design where you have to worry about your bleeds and gutters is PowerPoint. My layouts come back from the printer looking as intended, but it does take a long time. I am willing to pay a few hundred bucks US for good software to make this task easier and/or improve the look. What do you recommend for someone who will have to learn a new tool?

I saw this question but the OP already knew InDesign. The resulting book needs to look nice, I want full-bleed photos, page numbers, spine design, the works. I used Pagemaker a bit way back in the day, and have made a couple LaTeX papers for publication using someone else's templates, but never InDesign or other layout tools. I understand there will be a huge learning curve and then a lot of work, I'm technical and a quick study so having to learn a new tool is not a problem. E.g., I use GNU IMP because it seems to work and I don't feel like paying for Photoshop. In general I don't like the idea of giving money to Adobe because they're obnoxious, but if it's truly the best software that is fine. Mac only, that part is non-negotiable. I have Pages and current versions of Word and Powerpoint if that makes a difference.

What are my options here? Goal is to produce a full-color PDF for print.

posted by wnissen to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

InDesign IS Pagemaker, with some bells and whistles added. The names for things are still the same (e.g. "Place," etc.).
posted by Melismata at 8:40 AM on January 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

An alternative to InDesign is Affinity Publisher. It's a one-time cost, not a subscription. If you're somewhat familiar with Pagemaker, it may not be a huge transition.

Affinity also has a photo editing software, but if I were in your position, I'd pay for Photoshop Elements, which is almost as powerful as photoshop, but just a 1-time cost as well.
posted by hydra77 at 8:56 AM on January 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm not sure what exactly you want to do that LaTeX doesn't cover? Lots of books are laid out completely within LaTeX. The default automagically generated layouts are nice enough for many purposes, and if you're willing to invest more time in learning, you can extensively tweak things to better suite your needs too. It's especially easy to install via TexShop if you don't already have it on your current Mac.
posted by SaltySalticid at 9:31 AM on January 20, 2023

I would also recommend Affinity Publisher. I only use it for things that need to be put together more confidently than Pages will allow, but it does a great job at that. I had used InDesign for the same sort of tasks previously and… I might like Publisher better? Affinity offers short tutorials on their site to help reduce the learning curve.

(Tangentially, for photo editing I would recommend looking into Acorn, but Affinity Photo is also pretty good.)
posted by TangoCharlie at 9:55 AM on January 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

I hesitate to recommend this, because's part of the reason I spent way too long in grad school, but if you already know LaTeX then the memoir package is the standard recommendation for professional book typesetting within LaTeX. I'm not going to sit here and tell you it's going to be fun or easy, but it is an option, and unusually for this kind of software the documentation is excellent.
posted by caek at 10:30 AM on January 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've done layout for 20+ years and Indesign use to be my program of choice, until I had to switch from Indesign 6. It was a standalone application and great, but Adobe went to a subscription model and who needs nickel and dimed like that?

The Affinity suite of products is what I've switched too and I'm pretty pleased with them.

Never used LaTex, but if you have, then sticking with the devil you know might be the best option.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:34 AM on January 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

I had to have a book bound. I used Latex. It has some nice features, but it's archaic software with a million layers of evolutionary crud. I wanted to make my book into signatures (sets of sixteen folded sheets for binding) and nobody on the web and none of my friends who told me it was the best thing ever could remotely help. Everyone says it's the finest software for books ever written, but it couldn't lay out a book for binding. Any help I got on the web was: become an expert, write a package to do this, and future generations will thank you.
Everything about Latex has been so perfectly worked out by so many people that there's no need to change, and don't you ever forget that.
I eventually did what I was told, and kludged everything, and it got done. I reformatted my thousand page book six times in one evening, starting from scratch each time.
I was impressed with Latex. I will never use it again.
I've used the desktop publishing package MS sometimes includes with Office. It's trivial to learn and to use, but you have to do each page by hand.
Last time I wanted to print a book I did it in MS Word and told the printer to take care of making sure the pages matched up front to back. It took half an hour.
There is no perfect solution if you want to make sure your chapters start on the right hand page and start the page numbers after the introduction. I should say there's no seamless, intuitive solution. There should be.
Nowadays I write in my old copy of Wordperfect and get the guy in the print shop to cut and spiral bind my books for $3 each, and I'm happy.
posted by AugustusCrunch at 1:31 PM on January 20, 2023 [1 favorite]