On Thursday 26 April 2007 07:41, Gregory Pittman wrote: > Jason Champion wrote: > > > The main question comes down to, what is Latex lacking? Admittedly > it's not perfect, it has its issues, but for handling > bibliographies, TOC, indexes, headings and subheadings, all of this > is built-in and working well. > > Greg > TeX has variants other than LaTeX. I use Context and plain pdftex. I don't use LaTeX.
In plain TeX I use the stand alone program Makeindex, part of the TeX dstro. The indexable terms are tagged in typical TeX fashion in the body of the text. Remember TeX is not WYSIWYG. The first TeX pass generates a file e.g., foo.idx, which contains the raw data of index items with their page numbers. Then Makeindex is run, which sorts and summarizes the items, adds headings for letter groups, and creates a file e.g., foo.ind. The next TeX pass incidentally creates another foo.idx file (ignored) but the purpose of this run is to import the foo.ind file and typeset the index. I mention this because most of the heavy lifting on index creation has been done already by the creators of Makeindex. The tricky part becomes the tagging of the terms in a way that won't upset the layout. Scribus is however an interactive and not a batch program. I can live without indexing and even TOC generation, which can be done manually. But good paragraph layout and decent hyphenation are essentials. Any hints on how to use the existent paragraph style facility etc. effectively would be welcome. Why bother with Scribus for books? Well Scribus is ahead in certain prepress areas, such as color management, spot color and so on. It is already my weapon of choice for laying out covers. Can't wait for the next release! -- John Culleton Able Indexing and Typesetting Precision typesetting (tm) at reasonable cost. Satisfaction guaranteed. http://wexfordpress.com
