I hope turning scribblings into a book isn't quite as hard as lead into gold.

March 13, 2008 4:32 PM

Software that will format a large amount of text?

I'm sorry if this is a dumb question, but a couple of weeks of looking hasn't yielded anything that would work. I've had a look here, but I don't think any of the answers were what I need.

What I have is a bunch of large documents with unformatted text (>200 000 words). It is in a number of .txt, Word and OpenOffice files. It doesn't all need to end up in the same file, but that would be nice. What I would like to do is to compile it and divide it into two columns. I would also like to be able to add headings and titles where necessary, as well as numbering the pages. Being able to insert pictures and diagrams, and document and chapter titles in the top left and right hand corners would be a major bonus.

I know I can do most of this with Word, but a couple hundred pages of tables that need to be aligned just right doesn't seem like fun.

It doesn't matter what OS the solution runs on and I would prefer to spend as little money possible.

Thanks Mefites!

posted by Ctrl_Alt_ep to computers & internet (10 answers total)

LyX/LaTeX is definitely what you need.
posted by tumult at 4:36 PM on March 13, 2008

Curses, tumult beat me. He's right; LaTeX.
posted by Justinian at 4:37 PM on March 13, 2008

You could also consider FrameMaker, which allows you to divide up your pages into chapters.
posted by Melismata at 4:51 PM on March 13, 2008

Yeh, you could do this in Word, except for two issues: first, Word is the wrong tool for a pile of tables. You could write a quickie macro to format the tables for you automagically, more or less, but they'd probably need some tweaking. The second issue is that Word files with many tables, whether viewed in normal or page view, chug a lot of cycles. In my experience, any word file over about 150 pages and 20 tables becomes rapidly unusable.

So you can break it down into multiple documents, which has its own set of problems.

I wouldn't, however, suggest LaTeX unless you're willing to put in the effort you need to use it. LyX is a better implementation or people who are used to using a Word-like interface. But you'll still have a learning curve.

If this were my job, what software I'd use would depend on what the final product had to be. If the final deliverable is a book, I'm running my Word macros on chunks of the document and then pasting them into FrameMaker and providing output as PDF. But this isn't your cheapest option.

LyX is probably your cheapest (but not easiest) option.
posted by ten pounds of inedita at 4:56 PM on March 13, 2008

'better implementation for people'
posted by ten pounds of inedita at 4:57 PM on March 13, 2008

Thanks guys. Looks like I have my work cut out for me.
posted by Ctrl_Alt_ep at 6:12 PM on March 13, 2008

late to the party, but I'd recommend troff. It's got more of a terse command set, but is fairly easily learned. It can do very complex things, and a full installation is tiny compared to TeX.

If you have access to a linux box, it will have groff installed.
posted by scruss at 6:29 PM on March 13, 2008

The party never stops, scruss. I'll definitely have a look.
posted by Ctrl_Alt_ep at 6:31 PM on March 13, 2008

Any particular reason why you don't just use OpenOffice Writer for this? It's OK with long documents, can generate multi-column layouts, has excellent style sheet support, is more WYSIWYG than Word, has change tracking, uses an open document format, runs on Windows, Mac, Linux or Unix and is free.

You have a whole bunch of words to process - what's wrong with using a good word processor?
posted by flabdablet at 7:30 PM on March 13, 2008

Also: I heartily endorse everything DanYHKim said in the other thread. Style sheets are your friend.
posted by flabdablet at 7:41 PM on March 13, 2008