Bushwalker’s Weblog

Bushwalker, whose background includes journalism and publishing, has an interest in various aspects of publishing including it’s technologies.

Bushwalker has first-hand experience of producing electronic text for processing by a typesetting bureau through to production ready pdfs.

The main tools that Bushwalker uses are

• the open source TeX typesetting system (pronounced tech as in technical)

• Nitropdf (commercial)

• the open source Scribus

All desktop publishing has a steep learning curve.

Getting started with TeX

With TeX it took me a few weeks of learning to produce a reasonably high quality report from text that had been conventionally prepared and formatted using a word processor. If you have a Word or WordPerfect document you can strip out the formatting by saving a copy of the document in a plain text format. The text may then be marked up in a suitable text editor such as Notepad, SciTE or Vim (We’ll return to marking up later).

Alternatively if you have a more recent version of OpenOffice, you may import your formatted document into OpenOffice and export in LaTeX 2e (.tex) format. Depending on the complexity of the original document a good proportion of the original formatting will be preserved. However, do not expect the ultimate products to look the same as TeX processing using proper design considerations. The OpenOffice export route offers a good ‘quick-and-dirty’ approach. With a little tweaking, as will be demonstrated later, the latex code produced by OpenOffice can lead to a professional quality document, at least from a design aspect. The content may or may not be professional!

The following pdf file demonstrates the wordprocessing document to LaTeX pathway. Some tweaking was necessary.

seahorse3.pdf

Getting into TeX markup

The following is an example of tex code

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{multicol}
\setlength\parskip{0.5cm}
\begin{document}
\begin{center}
\sffamily{\large \textbf{A demonstration document}}
\end{center}
\bigskip
\begin{multicols}{2}
\rmfamily
\lipsum[1-10]
\end{multicols}
\end{document}

Simply copy this code into a plain text editor (such as Notepad) and save the file as lipsumtest.tex, then navigate your web browser to Web LaTeX where you can paste the code into the input area on the online LaTeX facility. Press the “submit”, wait a few seconds and scroll down a little to see the results in pdf format. You may save the pdf to your computer. You now have on your computer the source file and the typeset document.

Your typeset document should look like this lipsumtest.pdf