#Publisher's Type Foundry
5 messages in this thread
What am I writing for these days? Money, mainly. I'm so busy doing manuals
for clients that I don't have time for much else. I've done a couple of
things for Borland's new house publication, _Turbo_Technix_, and will
probably do more. Apart from that, my main ambition is to find time to write
some fiction (I mean fiction that's _supposed_ to be fiction…)
Jonathan,
It looks like you and I are in the same game. I make my (very good) living at
writing technical manuals for Silicon Valley high-technology companies and
also have aspirations to write fiction! I know very well of the "other"
fiction that you mentioned—it's all too prevalent in this area.
Most of my work is devoted to 100+ page (sometimes 800+ page) manuals that
are constantly in a state of being upgraded or superceded by new versions.
I'm using Ventura Publisher for all of my latest manuals, having recently
converted over from TeX. The only thing I miss that TeX had, in spades, was
support for mathematical typesetting and those super "math-italic" fonts. If
you happen to know of anyone who sells math-fonts (not the stupid "symbol"
stuff, but "real" mathematics-oriented typefaces) that are compatible with
VP, I'd appreciate knowing about them. Also, if some brave soul knows how to
convert TeX's bitmapped fonts and `.tfm' files to PostScript, or
VP-compatible form, I'd be interested in having a copy of the program that
does that.
-rich-
What sort of fiction are you interested in? My interests run mostly to "soft"
science fiction: character-study stories that happen to be set against a
science fiction background. I've been attending meetings of a writer's group
for about four years, during which time I've written perhaps 3-1/2 stories,
much less than I'd like.
I've never gotten really involved with TeX, although I've come close from
time to time. I'm currently doing most of my work in Microsoft Word, at my
clients' requests. Most of my work is similar to most of yours, except that I
tend to write sets of medium length manuals instead of single huge ones. My
update problems are the same as yours.
I'm curious to know what you think of Ventura's indexing facility. I've
studied it (I haven't used it extensively) and it looks both limited and
awkward. I've thought about developing an accessory program that would insert
index entries much more efficiently and also do a better job of index
generation. Any comments?
Are you a member of the V.P. User's Group? There's a good chance that someone
there knows about math fonts for Ventura, or can create them.
BTW, Publisher's Type Foundry now claims to talk to Ventura, although I can't
try it out until I can persuade Windows to run on my machine.
Jonathan,
I also use Microsoft Word, extensively. I spend most of my time in that
environment—but with just a simple style-sheet that provides visual
separation of paragraphs, and no formatting per-se—and then import the text
into Ventura Publisher for formatting and layout.
I confess I haven't yet used VP's index facility, just the Table of Contents
generation, so I don't have a considered opinion as yet. I'm in the midst of
preparing a medium-size manual just now and will probably have to bite the
bullet and get acquainted with indexing soon. No system of indexing is very
easy and from what I've read about VP's version, it seems like the usual sort
of headache (inserting index entries where they belong). The main problem is
selecting index-able topics and keeping track of the keywords so that you
don't have several nearly-alike entries. One thing that's very poor in VP is
the lack of a "cross-reference" facility. You have to indicate these manually
and if the sectioning changes, it's a major headache. That's one area where
TeX (actually, LaTeX) is much better than VP.
I'm not familiar with Publisher's Type Foundry and I'm also reluctant to run
Windows, so… (too slow)! I guess I'll have to wait for some more progress
on DTP fonts and not get too anxious about the math-italic faces.
RE: fiction. I haven't really completed anything in that regard. I've started
several books that are "Michael Crichton"-like things (Andromeda Strain), but
seem to bog down and discard them before completion. I'm inclined toward
computer-oriented fiction…maybe some day… 🙂
-rich-
If I may jump in, I think that Ventura's indexing facility is good, but its
toc facility isn't. In general, multichapter publications aren't handled as
well as they might be. Ventura doesn't automatically handle page numbers from
chapter to chapter — you've got to note where one chapter ends, and manually
set the first page number of the next chapter. Same is true for chapter
numbers. Ventura will let you specify that a chapter start on a left or right
page, but it doesn't adjust the preceding chapter by inserting a blank page
when appropriate. And Ventura doesn't correctly handle more than a single
logical chapter in a chapter file.
Looking forward to 1.2…
Eli