After doing the layout for the first issue of Dewclaw using Scribus, I knew that there must be an easier and more reliable way to do this work.
Miles asked if I’d looked at LaTeX, and after figuring out what he was pronouncing, I said that I hadn’t. I had the impression that it was specialized for technical papers, mathematical formulas and that sort of thing. Well, it is, but people have done the work to make it quite feasible to produce books or magazines using LaTeX.
After some research, I installed the texlive package using Synaptic. After working with that a bit I also installed the latest version of the memoir class manually in my homedir.
I haven’t done a full Dewclaw issue with it yet, but I did lay out a small book called Not That Far, and it worked real well.
I think this will be a much better method.
The biggest limitation that I see so far is that in Dewclaw, each author’s piece may still have to be done separately with special attention to the author’s paragraph preferences and such.
One of the big advantages I see of using LaTeX is that the defaults are really sensible, and fill in the gaps in my book design knowledge. Just throwing text in gives you great-looking pages. After some configuration it is possible to compromise this good design, but the manual for the memoir class includes so much information on book design and history that there is no good excuse for making poor choices with using it.