Design A Book With OpenOffice.Org Writer [Paperback]

Luke Muehlhauser (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 20, 2008

I will teach you how a professional would design each part of your book. Then I will show you exactly how to do it all in OpenOffice.org Writer, step by step.

Product Details

• Paperback: 136 pages
• Publisher: CreateSpace (December 20, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1440467005
• ISBN-13: 978-1440467004
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,899,642 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent tool for learning basic design, January 22, 2009

By 

Steve Weber "author of ETSY 101: SELL YOUR CR... (Northern Virginia, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Design A Book With OpenOffice.Org Writer (Paperback)

I have been looking for a way to escape from Microsoft Word, and this book gave me a very painless way out. "Design a Book" teaches you the basic rules of book layout & design, and how to use those concepts with the free OpenOffice Writer software. So whether you're using a PC or a Mac (or are considering a switch from PC to Mac), you can hit the ground running with the well-written guidance here.

Considering how utterly confusing it can be to learn a new word-processing program (let alone book design), the author has done an unbelievably good job of boiling everything down to the essentials, in easy-to-understand language.

If you're tired of banging your head against the wall with MS Word like me, get a copy of this book. It can save you untold hours of frustration.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not the way to get the most important thing right, March 31, 2010

By 

Alan Venable "Author/creator of 'Dr. Peanut'... (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Design A Book With OpenOffice.Org Writer (Paperback)

I was delighted to see this book come out and I actually bought it! It seemed clear for the first chapter or two, but then it seemed to get less careful about what needs to be done in what order. When I got as far as trying to make chapter titles appear in the right-hand page headers, I tried to follow what the book was saying, actually started from scratch twice, and both times came to a dead end. Something's missing in the explanation; don't know what; but there are also various typos in the book that make me wonder whether the author really double-checked what he wrote. As of now, I've just lost 6-8 hours of time using it.

A better book for the overall process (written by one of the OpenOffice gurus) is Jean Hollis Weber's Self-Publishing Using OpenOffice 3 Writer.

You can get instruction and more online from "Tutorials for OpenOffice." Downloading "Create and Modify a Table of Contents." Also download the "Results" file which you can use as a platform for designing your own book. What it will give you is a working document containing a table of contents integrated with a set of headings that you can shape into your own chapter titles and headings. This will save you a lot of frustration.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very Well Thought out Book, September 7, 2009

By 

Brandon Simpson "Small Town Press" - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Design A Book With OpenOffice.Org Writer (Paperback)

This book is great for learning how to format a book in OOo Writer. The author walks you through each stage of formatting a book step by step.

Table of Contents

Getting Started
Front Matter & Chapters
Type Design
Objects in Text
Your Workflow
Back Matter
Final Thoughts

One advantage Writer has over MS Word is that it's completely free. Writer also has a built in PDF converter. However, the author doesn't recommend using the built in PDF function. He recommends PrimoPDF, which I now use for converting Word documents.

After reading the book, I decided to stick to Word. I guess I've gotten too used to Word to want to switch over to Writer. One thing I really like about Word is its Section Break function. It really helps in keeping the chapters separated from one another. In Writer, I think you have to define a new page style for each chapter. This should ensure that pages without text be completely blank (no page number, no title in the header, etc.) At the very least, I learned some new tips about book design that I can apply in Word.

One thing that could've made the book better was how to design a cover in Writer, or even in OOo Draw. If you dowload OOo suite, you get Writer, Draw, and other programs.

If you'd prefer to use MS Word, get a copy of Perfect Pages: Self Publishing with Microsoft Word, or How to Design Your Own Book for Desktop Publishing and Print on Demand (Word 97-2003 for Windows, Word 2004 for Mac) and/or HOW TO SELF-PUBLISH YOUR BOOK WITH BOOKSURGE FOR LESS $$$: A Step-by-Step Guide for Designing & Formatting Your Microsoft Word Book to POD & PDF Press Specifications.

Another advantage that Writer has over Word is that Writer looks like the older versions of Word. Word 2007 looks radically different from its predecessors, so Writer may save you a lot of headache if you don't want to use Word 2007.

Brandon Simpson