Open Office 1.1 as book layout tool

External Since: Jan 04, 2004 Posts: 2

I have started using the above program and find that I can typeset a
whole book and layout the front cover - not quite intuitive and a bit
fiddly to get the text to end neatly and consistently at the bottom of
the page and placing frames on the front cover is a bit irksome - a
couple of hours learning curve, I would say if you are used to Word or
Pagemaker. But it has this really neat one click feature for making
PDF files that work fine and view in Acrobat without any problems.
However, it does not seem possible to change text in Acrobat using its
tools (not that I really wanted to) and I was wondering if this would
be a problem if files are sent to someone like Lightning Source (who
for instance add on the barcode for free) as they have some warnings
about using non-Adobe programs

External Since: Jul 10, 2003 Posts: 19

Sorn wrote:

> I have started using the above program and find that I can typeset a
> whole book and layout the front cover - not quite intuitive and a bit
> fiddly to get the text to end neatly and consistently at the bottom of
> the page and placing frames on the front cover is a bit irksome - a
> couple of hours learning curve, I would say if you are used to Word or
> Pagemaker. But it has this really neat one click feature for making
> PDF files that work fine and view in Acrobat without any problems.
> However, it does not seem possible to change text in Acrobat using its
> tools (not that I really wanted to) and I was wondering if this would
> be a problem if files are sent to someone like Lightning Source (who
> for instance add on the barcode for free) as they have some warnings
> about using non-Adobe programs

I have found that it is quite good, but there seem to be a few problems (I'm
experimenting with the Linux version). First, when I placed a big,
high-resolution CMYK tiff file, the PDF output compressed the image too much
for my liking. Second, the pair kerning in Type 1 fonts is broken in OpenOffice
version 1.1, though it works fine in 1.0.3.

I think you should produce and place your own barcode in your book. A pdf from
OpenOffice, like many other pdf files, can be opened in Adobe Illustrator and
edited but Illustrator understands a very limited set of font encodings. So if
you used accented characters or even M-dashes, they might not be correctly
understood by Illustrator and another character would be substituted. Better to
not have Lightening Source edit your files.