Customer Reviews

Design A Book With OpenOffice.Org Writer

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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.

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.

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

Many of us dream of getting the book inside our head down on paper, and selling it on Amazon.The largest book publisher in the world. No need to keep on dreaming because you can now take ACTION with Design A Book with OpenOffice.org Writer. I confess I was dubious about using Open Office because it would be another long learning curve to master. Who has time for that when the "Hot" idea inside your head wants to be expressed NOW!

However, this book by Luke Muehlhauser takes that fear away. He gets right to the point of all the hows and why's to use Open Office just for writing your book. Along with step by step instructions on each sequence to write, format, and design the book. Point and click fairly easy for each step. If your like me I have to go over things once or twice to be sure I'm doing it correctly. That's not the authors fault. It's my mine. He even gives a finial book check out list to ensure you have remained on target. If you do get stuck he includes a direct link where you can find answers to your most pressing problems.Now just Do It!

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