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A
AlanFrank
Participant
January 8, 2022
Question

Book Formatting

  • January 8, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 226 views

I am creating a book with 200 pages of text, 10 chapters, 20 pages of illustrations, ~500 endnotes, Glossary, Index etc.

Initially composed in MS Word but need better software to format it properly.

 

Any suggestion on what software package might work best?

 

 

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1 reply

T
Test Screen Name
Legend
January 9, 2022

InDesign or FrameMaker are the only possibilities from Adobe. You will probably need other apps to handle the illustrations. Choosing between them - well, InDesign is preferred for "design led" work, while FrameMaker is particularly well suited to heavily structured work. In all cases it's vital to work with paragraph and character styles, never change settings for fonts, paragraphs etc. by hand.

Dave Creamer of IDEAS
Community Expert
Dave Creamer of IDEASCommunity Expert
Community Expert
January 10, 2022

>>>InDesign or FrameMaker are the only possibilities from Adobe

200 pages is not long for either program. Frame has more book [edit] advanced features, but I doubt you will need it for this size book. The graphics and index shouldn't be a problem to either program.

 

If you have endnotes, stay with InDesign. Frames "endnotes" are really cross-references.

Frame can handle multiple index-like markers, including glossary markers. You will probably want to use cross-references in InDesign.

 

If text is already in Word, I would be leaning towards InDesign unless there are some other issues we don't know about.

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)
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