Tooling: About to start my book using LaTex. Good Idea or No-Go?

#43

Thanks for sharing your experience.
You’ve mentioned Affinity Designer, however for a book project Affinity Publisher is probably more useful (both work together well, anyway).

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#44

Yes, you’re right. I meant publisher not Designer. I bought all three affinity tools lately and as you can see I’m not an expert … yet! :slight_smile:

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#45

Hi Stefan, this thread was very useful to me. I took a look at the preview of your “A Fistful of Darkness” book on DriveThruRPG and it looks beautiful.

Am I correct in understanding that your hesitancy around LaTeX is about producing PDFs for print, and that it’s still good for digital downloads like the one you have on DriveThruRPG? I’m trying to publish a Fate setting, and I’ve got experience with LaTeX (and am a software developer), but after a few hours with Scribus I find myself frustrated. I’d much rather use LaTeX and I think I’d end up with a nicer PDF with it than I think I’m capable of making with Scribus.

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#46

Yes, it’s just as you said. I created my book with pdf in mind and forgot bleed which was needed for print products. Adding it later was too much hassle in my point of view.

Sounds like you know what you’re doing and installing LaTex is much easier nowadays (just install a Tex Distribution lik MikTex and a GUI like TexWorks and you’re done. Autoinstalling packages is pretty easy to do this way).

I hear you regarding Scribus … it was painful for me and I stopped using it ever since.

Latex provides you with a beaufiful type setting and so it may be woth the hassle.

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#47

Thanks so much for confirming, Stefan – that tracks.

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#48

@StefanAKAmonkeyEcho, thanks for sharing your experience!

I do most of my writing in LaTeX (I use Verbosus’s VerbTex app on my tablet). I do this purely to indulge my own fustiness and obsessive–compulsive tendencies.

I don’t think I’d use it to write something I intended to publish and sell, for exactly the reasons you ran up against—it’s not designed for the kind of art-book style that we expect from modern commercial RPGs.

(It would be great for a book on the mathematical foundations of an RPG, on the other hand.)

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#49

I ended up completing the book using LaTeX:

In terms of the quality of the PDF, I’m confident it’s much better than I could do using WYSIWIG publishing software like Scribus.

Like @StefanAKAmonkeyEcho said, though – bleed is a PITA. I’ve got ample margins but DriveThru is still refusing the upload when I try to set up the POD version. I’ll need to do a few experiments and/or contact them to figure out how they determine whether you’re respecting the bleed margins.

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#50

Looks cool! LaTex (again) doing a great job creating a nice looking page of text. Regarding bleed: I changed to Affinity Publisher to solve this problem … and got new ones instead now :wink:

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#51

That’s interesting. I’ve heard good things about Affinity. Personally, I’m a software developer by day – and I frankly have little trust in my laptop – so storing everything for my book in a git repository was pretty natural for me. So I’m definitely hoping I can find a way to set it up so POD works!

I also put together a Fate LaTeX template based on the D&D one: https://github.com/tomhart-msc/Fate-LaTeX-Template

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#52

I found this articles (too late for me) which explains a bit about online format. It even has an example for 6x9 inch with 0.25 inch bleed.

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#53

Thanks, Stefan, I’ll look into that!

I also noticed that the bleed information is a warning, so even if LaTeX doesn’t annotate the PDF correctly, if I know my text is within the safe area and the pages are the correct size, I should be OK.

For the cover… I just need to suck it up and use Scribus.

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#54

I was able to get it working with the Geometry package, still using the book class:

\RequirePackage[
  %paperwidth=6.125in, 
  %paperheight=9.25in,
  papersize={6.125in,9.25in},
  layoutsize={6in,9in},
  %layouthoffset=0.125in,
  layoutvoffset=0.125in, 
  twoside, 
  textwidth=4in, 
  %showframe,
  % These apply only to the layout region
  outer=1.25in,  % 1.25in + 1.25in bleed
  inner=0.75in, 
  top=0.6875in,  % 0.6875in + 1.25in bleed = 1.9375in
  bottom=0.6875in]{geometry} % 0.6875in + 1.25in bleed

I need to manually approve a copy that is in the mail, but hopefully I’ll be offering POD in a few weeks!

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#55

And it’s now up on DriveThruRPG in POD!

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#56

I think the first and most important thing is to check that your publisher will accept a PDF generated by LaTeX! If yes, then go for it if it works for you!

Unlike many people here, I had a great experience with Scribus. The trick is that you should only use it for a finished text. I wrote my book in Word, and once it was done (and I mean done), then I copy-pasted it into Scribus and did the layout.

I tried a trial of InDesign and it was a disaster. I couldn’t understand anything at all. I was instantly able to get started with Scribus. Scribus was so much more intuitive, and free! The only downside is that conversion to PDF was a bit of a challenge. Scribus struggled to generate a PDF with non-standard fonts that DriveThruRPG would accept. I ended up having to rasterize the pages that used non-standard fonts. This might be a show-stopper for you if you like fancy fonts everywhere.

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