Book publishing: large, small file

[WPA Ne]

I am editing what amounts to a book, about 400 pages, about 250
photographs. Word was just not doing a good job with the placement of
pictures, so I wanted to start using a desktop publisher. So far
Publisher 2003 has been sort of a trying experience to learn after using
Word for many years. It never imported my Word document right for
probably a number of reasons. So I was doing it the cut-and-paste way,
about 20 pages at a time, with both Word and Publisher open at the same
time. It seemed to have a problem with the pictures (so I removed them
all), with the headers and footers (so I removed them all), and with
footnotes. Pasting was a weird deal, as sometimes Publisher would not
put all of the text in the right place when I had a footnote.

The other issues are the Table of Contents and the Index. Are there
third-party utilities that are written which mimic the abilities of Word
to automatically Index from a Concordance file, or to automatically make
a Table of Contents? All of my time spent doing the style definitions in
Word seems to be rather futile, as Publisher seems to change a lot of
the formatting (by default). IF I ever forget to use that drop-down box
after a paste to choose "keep source formatting" then I may be in trouble.

Any way, I want to see what people think now about splitting up my
publisher document in chapters? Will it be worth my while to keep
everything in the same document, or is it better to keep chapters things
in separate files to be merged later by the eventual printer? Since the
styles seem to be shot anyway, I don't see a lot of need to keep stuff
together.

As for file size, I already decided to keep the images as linked files
(I wish this default was able to be changed) and that way the .PUB file
will be relatively small. I ended up with a 200 MB Word file once, and
so I was having great difficulty doing much with such a large file
during saves.

I will be sending this to and from the author, and so by keeping each
chapter a "package" of around 30 MB or so, it will be a lot easier for
him to look at.

As a final issue, I wonder how many people publishing a book really use
Publisher? From what I've seen, the integration with Word is minimal for
many "fancy" things. The web help seems to indicate certain things like
"Be sure and not format such-and-such in Word if you will import it into
Publisher, because Publisher is a far less mature and capable program
than Word, which doesn't supports things which have been in Word for
less than ten or fifteen years." [paraphrase] Is the integration of
Adobe and Quark programs as, um, robust as Publisher?

So far, I haven't discovered a way to do any normal linking of footnotes
to the text. For example, if a footnote is on page 221, and I add a
picture that flows text to page 222, is there anything that will move
the footnote box for me?

And if I wanted to have a snippet that said, "See the photo on page
221," would it change to say "222" in that instance.

Thanks.

 

[Ed Bennett]

The other issues are the Table of Contents and the Index. Are there
third-party utilities that are written which mimic the abilities of Word
to automatically Index from a Concordance file, or to automatically make
a Table of Contents?

No, but I am available for hire.

All of my time spent doing the style definitions in
Word seems to be rather futile, as Publisher seems to change a lot of
the formatting (by default). IF I ever forget to use that drop-down box
after a paste to choose "keep source formatting" then I may be in trouble.

You should have the "Use Destination Styles" option available; you will
just need to redefine the styles in Publisher.

As for file size, I already decided to keep the images as linked files
(I wish this default was able to be changed) and that way the .PUB file
will be relatively small.

No it won't, as all images, linked or otherwise, are also embedded into
the Publisher file.

I ended up with a 200 MB Word file once, and
so I was having great difficulty doing much with such a large file
during saves.

That is one reason to use separate files for each chapter.

As a final issue, I wonder how many people publishing a book really use
Publisher? From what I've seen, the integration with Word is minimal for
many "fancy" things. The web help seems to indicate certain things like
"Be sure and not format such-and-such in Word if you will import it into
Publisher, because Publisher is a far less mature and capable program
than Word, which doesn't supports things which have been in Word for
less than ten or fifteen years." [paraphrase]

Ugh. That is:
a) misguided
b) out-of-date

Publisher handles objects in a completely different way to Word, and so
copying and pasting entire documents into Publisher will not always
work. It is not a matter of Publisher being less capable. The only areas
where that is the case that I can think of offhand are:

- footnotes
- strikethrough

Is the integration of
Adobe and Quark programs as, um, robust as Publisher?

The integration with Word? To my knowledge, it's non-existant. The
programs also have a much steeper learning curve, and would require a
good deal of training before you would be able to produce your book to a
reasonable standard. Although once you were at that level you'd be in an
enviable position to do DTP work, and the job would probably be a fair
bit easier than using Publisher for it.

So far, I haven't discovered a way to do any normal linking of footnotes
to the text. For example, if a footnote is on page 221, and I add a
picture that flows text to page 222, is there anything that will move
the footnote box for me?

Not really. I tried and failed to develop a Publisher add-in to handle
footnotes.

And if I wanted to have a snippet that said, "See the photo on page
221," would it change to say "222" in that instance.

Not currently, but given sufficient time and money it *might* be
possible to code something that made it possible. No guarantees, though.

 

[WPA Ne]

You should have the "Use Destination Styles" option available; you will
just need to redefine the styles in Publisher.

That was indeed the default, but as I sort of hinted, it was not what I
wanted -- the source formatting was better. Somehow maybe the Publisher
definition of a style was different from Word's style.

This is one of the quirks I found pretty handily in this type of Word to
Publisher conversion fiasco: When you open a .DOC in Publisher, you're
asking for a lot of trouble. Simply doesn't work like expected. When you
use the import feature, same difference. When you copy and paste into a
pre-setup Publisher document, the results (for me) were nearly what I
expected. It went from 20% usable to 80% usable. For the remaining 20%
of problems, they seem to all have workarounds, if perhaps painful and slow.

Not what I was expecting from Publisher. Frankly, I had used PageMaker a
few years ago, and I had relatively good success from it doing an import
of some Word files, IIRC. I don't remember editing them any in
PageMaker, I just needed to send in a pagemaker file in a particular
template style. And since I saw that Adobe could import a Word file back
then, that the technology would be there and polished in Publisher 2003
(Or perhaps in InDesign). The only problem Pagemaker had as I recall was
with fonts, underlining, and something to do with postscript.

So here I am struggling to figure out if I can quickly convert 400
pages... I am only 50 pages along.

No it won't, as all images, linked or otherwise, are also embedded into
the Publisher file.

You're kidding. I didn't know that. **Are you sure?** Because I am only
up to about 5 MB, and when I Pack and Go, the compressed file is 25 MB.
That seems to tell me that the embedded file must be merely a snippet.

As a final issue, I wonder how many people publishing a book really
use Publisher? From what I've seen, the integration with Word is
minimal for many "fancy" things. The web help seems to indicate
certain things like "Be sure and not format such-and-such in Word if
you will import it into Publisher, because Publisher is a far less
mature and capable program than Word, which doesn't supports things
which have been in Word for less than ten or fifteen years." [paraphrase]

Ugh. That is:
a) misguided
b) out-of-date

See
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA010348711033.aspx#CreateText

That's what I was referring to.

All of those guidelines simply polish over the fact that there is an
incredible lack of support for importing certain features. Page size and
shape, just to get started. The automatic headers and footers left a lot
to be desired.

Thanks.

The more I think about this project, the more I would like to stick with
Word exclusively. I just didn't think I could format the photos like I
wanted. But Word 2003 seems to be smarter than the Word 2000 I had been
more accustomed to. I might try a little in Word and see if I can get
back to doing what I do better, which is editing, not desktop publishing.

 

[Ed Bennett]

That was indeed the default, but as I sort of hinted, it was not what I
wanted -- the source formatting was better. Somehow maybe the Publisher
definition of a style was different from Word's style.

Ah, I forgot that Publisher doesn't support Character styles. If you're
using those, then you will encounter trouble. Put that on the list
further down!

You're kidding. I didn't know that. **Are you sure?** Because I am only
up to about 5 MB, and when I Pack and Go, the compressed file is 25 MB.
That seems to tell me that the embedded file must be merely a snippet.

In later vresions the embedded version may be a lower-resolution
version. This will also depend on the image format you are using -
TIFFs, for example, will be recompressed internally as PNGs, whereas the
linked file included with P&G will remain a TIFF.

That's what I was referring to.

All of those guidelines simply polish over the fact that there is an
incredible lack of support for importing certain features. Page size and
shape, just to get started. The automatic headers and footers left a lot
to be desired.

Right. That is lack of integration (left hand not talking to the right
hand, things working in different ways in the two applications, etc.)
rather than Publisher being "less sophisticated" than Word.

The more I think about this project, the more I would like to stick with
Word exclusively. I just didn't think I could format the photos like I
wanted. But Word 2003 seems to be smarter than the Word 2000 I had been
more accustomed to. I might try a little in Word and see if I can get
back to doing what I do better, which is editing, not desktop publishing.

Word 2003 still makes this difficult. Unfortunately, migrating between
two classes of application is also difficult.