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sticklen
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Joined: 2007-07-12 08:32:09

new user question

Post by sticklen »

I am refuge from Frame Maker - which I still consider to be very good - just not supported very well by Adobe.

One of the things that Frame supports very well is book writing. Book chapters are individual files. A "book" then is an accumulation of bookfiles strung out in the linear order you specify.

Is there anything like this in Nisus? In the manual "book support" really is only for sectioning - which is clearly needed. But for a relatively long book. keeping all your "eggs" in one file strikes me as a bad idea.

Thanks!
---jon---
Jon Sticklen
CSE Dept
College of Engineering
Michigan State University
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martin
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Post by martin »

At this time there is no direct support for managing a large document across multiple files. Basically you'll have to configure the sections yourself, eg: setting the starting page number of the second document in your chain, etc.
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greenmorpher
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Post by greenmorpher »

Hi Jon

You might like to use the last bit of the process I use with my books which I set up in chapters in Canvas. Canvas has no book assembly facility, but I get around that by saving off all my chapters as PDFs, then use a very nice program called PDFpen to assemble them, then save the final file as the completed book.

I was using the ordinary PDFpen, not PDFpen Pro, because I didn't need the facility of making PDF documents which could be filled in on the screen (Canvas does that very nicely, thank you).

It was good enough for Lightning Source and a major book printer her in Oz.

This does demand that you index and ToC by hand, of course -- or at least assemble your index and ToC from chapter pieces. That's not hard for the ToC, but it is a bit of a pain for the Index if you have one.

The other approach would be to actually make a long document and to keep saving it off incrementally so that in the event of a crash, you didn’t lost too much work.

When I am DTPing even a short document, I do a "save as" every now and again and add a figure to the document name. So I have "Publication 1", Publication 2", Publication 3", etc. When I am tweaking the last little bits and pieces, I get really paranoid and do a new "save as" every 10 or 15 minutes!

You would know the feeling, I'm sure. :lol:

During the beta testing, though, the lads and lasses reported very good stability with long documents.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- Revealed! The secrets of how you can use type and layout to turbocharge your messages in print. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com
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