[wplug] Book published using Open Source software

[Bryan J. Smith]

Bill Moran <wmoran at potentialtech.com> wrote:
> Don't know.
> I mean, honestly, I have a split reason for doing the posting here,
> as well as to any other forum.  One reason is to brag about the
> fact that OSS was used to produce the book.  The other reason is
> free advertising for the book.
> I figure as long as the forum is appropriate for such a posting,
> nobody will mind, which is why I _didn't_ post to any OOo or
Scribus
> lists, as I couldn't find any that seemed appropriate.
> I don't frequent /. enough to know whether something like this is
> appropriate or not.

My apologies, I didn't mean to belittle any efforts, and I guess I'm
a little too much anti-/. that I didn't stop to think of what I was
saying.

In all honesty, I've been using StarWriter (and StarOffice) since
version 3.0, and it was always capable of 100+ pages with many
figures, unlike MS Word.  When Sun purchased StarDivision and
released  nearly all of the StarOffice 5.2 source code, I wasn't too
terribly worried about its capabilities to handle the size of a book.

Now what the open source community (even if half of the core
OpenOffice.org contributors are Sun employees) has done with
OpenOffice.org has been utter phenominal.  I personally prefer
typeset and DTP, but since Open/StarWriter import/export LaTeX
to/from ODF/MathML, and Scribus in-lines LaTeX, ODF/MathML and other
things, without issue, I'm more than estatic.

But I've been using Scribus for several years now, in addition to LyX
for 10 years, and StarOffice for 12 years.  Again, not trying to
belittle anyone's efforts, but using open source to write books is
quite commonplace.  In fact, it's more commonplace than, say, writing
a book in MS Word.  ;)


-- 
Bryan J. Smith   Professional, Technical Annoyance
b.j.smith at ieee.org    http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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