After advice on writing illustrated textbook

[Gasman]

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

[gwpriester]

Hi Mat

Most publishers want a PDF document with the images and text integrated unless the publisher is going to have his art department do the layout. This is best because this is what they do. You write. You provide the text and illustrations and let the publisher do the heavy lifting.

The Word document is useful for providing the text. Many publishers have a template so you can format the text as to headlines, chapter headings, etc. and then the text is automatically formatted when then import the Word document into their page layout application, usually Quark XPress or Adobe InDesign which are dedicated publication programs.

Word documents are also useful for editors to add their comments, questions and corrections.

[Xhris]

Substantial written works are better done in a word processor. Open Office Writer is free; Microsoft Word is much more efficient to use, well designed, and feature rich (and expensive). The downloadable tutorials on my website are examples of the kind of documents that can be produced when mixing Word and Xara. Word documents can be exported as PDF or XPS with this free addon for Word from Microsoft.

[Gasman]

Thank you Gary and Xhris for your advice.

It would seem sensible to let the publishers do what they are good at, as you advise Gary.

I have a quite clear idea of key features of the layout - such as having advanced sections of text in a block with a coloured background, to distinguish it from the general section etc. I guess it might be best to provide a mock up of a few pages made in Xara to illustrate these ideas, rather than trying to do the whole book that way.

I really like the way you have integrated the Xara images and the word document into a single pdf file Xhris. Would you be able to disclose the best way of doing this. Is it to export Xara images as jpegs, and import them into Word, and then export the entire document as pdf? Or does this way lead to loss of resolution of the images as they are JPEG and not vector based?

Excuse my ignorance but can publishing houses easily edit pdf files. My question is based on the fact that when I imported a pdf (constructed by someone else using a different package) into Xara for the document I was creating, I had to spend ages re-aligning a lot of text and lines.

Thank you again for any tips and advice,
Mat

[Albacore]

If your booklet say is not going have more than say 20 pages and not have a higher run of 100 booklets why not let your local print shop deal with it on their colour laser. It is just like your desktop laser but can handle larger pages sizes so that multiple pages can be printed at the same time. The reason I suggest this as it is easier to speak to someone face to face which reduces the frustration when you are editing and small issues can be solved. If you go the other road and use a large print house small mistakes can turn out to be expensive.

The other thing that I would suggest is to invest in a DTP programme as Word has its limitations and at the moment you could buy Serifs PagePlus X3 for less than $80 0r even download an earlier version of the programme for free and it can export and import PDF's. This means that you can do your graphics in Xara, export as PDF and then import into PagePlus with out loss in resolution.

If your booklet is under twenty pages I think it could be all done in Xara if you can work out a layout that your are happy with and do have a look in the Clipart Gallery as it has plenty which you could modify. The reason I state the 20 page max. as it can become quite slow if the booklet is graphically rich.

[Gasman]

Thank you Albacore, I hadn't considered a DTP package for this.

I think I may have been a bit confusing by talking about the document that I had previously worked on.

I am about to embark on writing an illustrated textbook. It will have in the region of 150 pages, and the aim is to get it published. It is based on a series of lectures that myself and a colleague have given. I have already created a host of simple images in Xara Xtreme that I have used in the lectures, and these will form the foundation for the diagrams in the book.
I wish the book to be interesting and fun to look at, and have components of the text in coloured boxes for "tips" or "advanced" sections.

It is because of the layout having multiple sections, that I was wondering the best way of working on it, and presenting it for a publishing house. From what you have all said it would seem inappropriate to use Xara for the bulk of it. I shall look at Word for the majority of the text, but maybe pull it together into a DTP package to put together the different sections on the page.

Thank you,
Mat

[gwpriester]

In that case a manuscript in Word is probably best with the illustrations either on the side or in place in the document. But at this stage don't worry about the layout.

Most publisher want to see a query in which you define the book, the market, the size, the competition, and your bio. If you have a specific publisher in mind, visit their website and see if they have an outline.

You would only need a program like Quark or InDesign if you plan to self publish it yourself.

If you do decide to self publish, maybe there is someone on campus who does that sort of thing who could take on the task.

[Xhris]

Thank you Gary and Xhris for your advice.
...
I have a quite clear idea of key features of the layout - such as having advanced sections of text in a block with a coloured background, to distinguish it from the general section etc. I guess it might be best to provide a mock up of a few pages made in Xara to illustrate these ideas, rather than trying to do the whole book that way.

I really like the way you have integrated the Xara images and the word document into a single pdf file Xhris. Would you be able to disclose the best way of doing this. Is it to export Xara images as jpegs, and import them into Word, and then export the entire document as pdf? Or does this way lead to loss of resolution of the images as they are JPEG and not vector based?
...
Thank you again for any tips and advice,
Mat

This is where it would have been helpful to have made tutorials on how to use MS Word properly by now. Most people are completely in the dark and so think it isn't as powerful as it actually is. While you can copy and paste from Xara directly into Word as editable OLE objects, the way Xara has implemented it currently, it is only suitable for print (fixed 96 dpi res) which isn't particularly useful seeing as Word docs are printed for the most part. So I exported the images from Xara as either PNG or JPG depending on the image and resultant file size, at physical size, and at print resolution (150-300 ppi). Then just inserted them into my Word doc as pics. Ensuring the correct pic layout with text is really easily done now in Word 2007 (contrary to most people's out of date beliefs). Most of my time making tutorials is spent a) planning the structure, and b) writing well (as opposed to just writing). Once the doc is completed, I used the free export to PDF feature in Word (see addon I linked to in previous post) and it makes an optimised, perfect PDF. I prefer to keep things as Word docs though and avoid PDFs, especially as there's a free Word 2007 doc viewer analogous to PDF or XPS viewers, but people have the false idea that it's somehow less good to transfer docx files (even if the font characters are embedded to ensure correct document reproduction).

You can use text boxes etc. to have floating sections with coloured backgrounds and tips etc. then position the text boxes anywhere like an object. For a big text heavy project, Word is a better choice over Xara, just for its better text support (Word is a text editor with relatively weak drawing capabilities; Xara is a graphics editor with relatively weak text functionality for projects like this).

[Gasman]

Wow Xhris, I was just writing to ask the best way of inserting Xara images into Word, was about to press "Submit Reply" and saw that you have just answered that question!

Thank you all very much for your help. I shall now launch ahead using Word for the text, and insert Xara images as described.

I had wondered if it was possible to insert vector based images into Word so that there was no loss of resolution - but it is pretty clear that this cannot be done easily.

Thank for your time Gary, Xhris and Albacore.

Mat

[Xhris]

I had wondered if it was possible to insert vector based images into Word so that there was no loss of resolution - but it is pretty clear that this cannot be done easily.

The only way to do this in Word is to use its graphics tools (which are very poor relative to Xara), or perhaps use a vector format like wmf--but that's more trouble than it's worth probably given its limitations. Best to just do what I do and use bitmaps optimised for printing in these kinds of documents.