Designing a book with LyX (NewsForge) [LWN.net]

Corinne McKay and Daniel J. Urist work with LyX to do desktop publishing. "Self-publishing is becoming easier and cheaper, thanks in part to improved printing technologies and desktop publishing tools. If you've ever considered writing a book, you may have looked at the layout capabilities of OpenOffice.org Writer, AbiWord, KWrite, or other word processing programs. While these tools can produce adequate results for many types of documents, it's also worth considering LyX, an open source (GPL) desktop publishing application that, with a bit of work, can create a really professional-looking book that is indistinguishable from a book produced by a mainstream publishing house."

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Designing a book with LyX (NewsForge)

Posted Aug 24, 2006 21:04 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

Nice article. I just wanted to post a little tip about using LyX to export to HTML. Perhaps this isn't what most people do with LyX, but it might help somebody.

When LyX exports to HTML, I found that it screwed up the 'fi' and 'fl' ligatures, so that they appeared as different (incorrect) glyphs in the HTML output. I corrected this by putting the following line in the LyX document's preamble:

\usepackage [OT1]{fontenc}

This switches the font encoding to the OT1 standard, instead of the T1 standard which LyX uses by default.

Why does this work? I have no idea. But it does work (for me at least.)

Self Publishing

Posted Aug 31, 2006 16:03 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]

Haven't used Lyx, but thought I'd toss in a few notes on self publishing. If you create the work in anything that ends up using Tex/Latex in the chain you are going to get pretty good output. I have been using DocBook & OpenJade lately and like it. Btw, with a little command line wizardry products who only supply PDF manuals can also be put on dead trees.

But getting the book part was always where I'd get stuck in the past. Three hole punched or spiral binding just comes up a little short in appearance even if it is often easier to use due to the ability to lie flat.

However I have learned two techniques now that kick the quality up a notch. Both require a good duplexing printer (or patience...) and mpage to get the smaller more booklike form.

For books under about fifty pages I have had pretty good success with simply putting a half dozen staples as close to the edge as possible and covering it up with binding tape. (I work in a public library, either order a small quantity from a library supply company or experiment with a similar stretchy and flexible substitute.)

For larger books (largest bound so far is The OpenBSD Guide at about 375 pages) get a few good clamps and a tube of Goop brand general purpose contact adhesive. Print the cover on legal paper (to allow for the spine width) and glue it together. Let it set up overnight and the result will hold up to regular use.