Looking for Internal Design or Typesetting software
June 28, 2018 12:39 PM   Subscribe

It occurred to me that with everything that is available online, software that lets self-publishing authors get their books ready for self-publishing houses may exist as well. So, does anyone know of any?

Specifically, I'm looking for a software that allows me to internally layout pages to include headings, page numbers and "bleed" along with offsetting odd and even pages, etc. Is there a desktop publishing platform that lets me do that and isn't just for fliers, brochures and business cards? Or is there a stand-alone program online somewhere?
posted by CollectiveMind to Media & Arts (7 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Adobe InDesign is the 800-lb gorilla in long-document design. There's a lot of depth to it. Quark Xpress still exists, but I don't think it has a lot of traction anymore.

You could do all the stuff you want in MS Word, but I wouldn't. If you really want to nerd out, you could do it in one of the many flavors of LaTeX (bonus: free).
posted by adamrice at 1:04 PM on June 28, 2018 [3 favorites]


IMO Overleaf has revolutionized the LaTeX ecosystem-- no need to download huge packages or deal with Unixy installations. Lots of book templates, and packages exist to insert crop and bleed marks.
posted by supercres at 1:37 PM on June 28, 2018


On the Mac side, there will soon be Affinity Publisher - https://9to5mac.com/2017/12/14/affinity-publisher-for-mac-tease-video-2018-beta-release/

and on Windows you can try open source software (free) Scribus - https://www.scribus.net/
posted by gregjunior at 2:25 PM on June 28, 2018


Scribus is cross-platform (Linux/Mac/Windows) and includes remarkably consistent PDF generation.
posted by scruss at 2:51 PM on June 28, 2018


Pressbooks is a pretty nifty online system for building and self-publishing books, originally built on top of Wordpress, so if you're familiar at all with the back end of that system it would be easy to deal with.
posted by zadcat at 6:18 PM on June 28, 2018


I've published books using Serif PagePlus software. The company has gone on to another product now, which I haven't tried, so Serif products (X7 through X9) are available at even better prices than they already were.

CreateSpace and Lulu both have templates available for various sizes of book.
posted by bryon at 10:57 PM on June 28, 2018


Response by poster: Thank you.
posted by CollectiveMind at 10:26 AM on June 29, 2018


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