Hi,

I am a doctor and have recently used Xara Xtreme to create a document that combines lots of separate forms into one streamlined pathway for the patient. It has gone down pretty well at the hospital that I work, and was really satisfying to do. I exported the document as PDF-X for the printers.

I am now looking into writing an illustrated text book with one of my colleagues at work. It will have lots of simple diagrams to explain concepts.
This is clearly a much larger affair than my pathway.

I am after some advice as to whether most publishing houses would want the text in 'word' format, and then simply the pictures as ?PDF. Would it be wrong for me to try to create the whole book in Xara and simply give them PDF-X of the book?

Ideally I would like to create the layout of the page with the text and images in Xara, but I don't want to spend ages doing this and then find out that the publishing house could not edit it as they need to.

What software should I ideally use for this?

Thank you,
Mat