[scribus] Using Scribus for novels and short stories

[Rob Oakes]

Hi Scottie,

Could you provide a little bit more detail about the project? Does the collection also include illustrations?  Is there any need for complex page layouts?

If not, you might be better looking at another tool for the job.  While Scribus can certainly be used for novels and short story collections, if the material is mostly text, you would probably be better served using LaTeX, which in my opinion is superior for long text documents.  Especially if you've made consistent use of styles.  Are you primarily concerned with paragraph and heading styles, or are there character styles as well?

An alternative to using pure LaTeX might be to convert the word documents to LyX, which provides a WYSIWYG wrapper that can simplify editing.  Then, you can either work to create a custom style sheet or document class so that your book has a distinctive look.

Front matter, such as the cover, title page, and copyright page can be created using Scribus and then added to the document at compile time.  This is a good route to take as creating a custom title page and cover in LaTeX can be a miserable experience.

I look forward to hearing more about your project.

Cheers,

Rob

PS, if you have access to a newer version of Word (e.g., 2010), it can save ODF documents directly (which can be converted to either LaTeX or Scribus).  You may wish to save from MS Word to ODF rather than using OpenOffice to convert. I've had some trouble with character styles being preserved correctly in OpenOffice.  Saving directly from Word seems to prevent the problem.