Ask HN: User friendly book writing software

#1

Post by Mr_question » Wed, Oct 21, 2009, 10:03 PM UTC

Hi, I have a book idea and will need to format pages in odd ways similar to how "Ripley's Believe it or Not" books are formatted. I wanted to know if their is any extremely user friendly and cheap MAC software that would allow me to place images and format in this manner. I am avoiding taking the Adobe route until I have to. I don't want to pay that much and it seems more complicated than it has to be. I want something that's fast, simple and cheap.!

Thank you!

BTW - if this doesn't exist it might be an idea for some of you developers to create :)

Re: Ask HN: User friendly book writing software

#2

Post by mbrubeck » Wed, Oct 21, 2009, 10:18 PM UTC

Have you tried the free trial of Pages from Apple?

http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/

http://www.apple.com/iwork/download-trial/

It's a combination word processor and page layout program. Not sure if it does everything you need, but it's probably worth a try.

Re: Ask HN: User friendly book writing software

#3

Post by makecheck » Wed, Oct 21, 2009, 11:33 PM UTC

You might try LyX ("lick"): http://wiki.lyx.org/Mac/Mac?from=LyX.LyXOnMac

It's basically a fancy front-end for LaTeX, and might do what you need. The printed output would certainly look nice.

Re: Ask HN: User friendly book writing software

#4

Post by Mr_question » Thu, Oct 22, 2009, 4:25 AM UTC

mbrubeck wrote: post #2

Have you tried the free trial of Pages from Apple? http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/ http://www.apple.com/iwork/download-trial/ It's a combination word processor and page layout program. Not sure if it does everything you need, but it's probably worth a try.

Thanks .. this seems "good enough" for what I was looking for