My experience creating a book in OpenOffice.org

[greyham]

I am a writer, and I use the OpenOffice.org Office Productivity Suite exclusively in my work. I like it because it's free, is community-supported, and has most of the features that I really need to get my job done.

I recently finished the 3rd draft of my first book, Freedom To Live, so I know what it's like to use OpenOffice.org Writer to create and edit a significant work of 400 pages, with over 30 chapters, a two-level table of contents, and several pictures. I also used OpenOffice.org Draw for the cover design, and PDF export to generate files to send to Lulu for printing. I was pleased to find that OpenOffice.org was up to the task, but there were a few quirks I had to navigate and some missing features which made the task more painful than I would have liked.

I partitioned my book as one sub-document per chapter with a master document containing the top-level table of contents and separating pages for the various sections. This approach worked really well because the text is huge; over 130,000 words. By avoiding applying formatting directly to paragraphs and using styles consistently, I could make global style changes just by editing the styles in the master document. I could also set the page size in the master document to what I needed for publishing, while leaving the page sizes in the sub-documents more appropriate for easy editing on-screen.

I struggled somewhat to get OpenOffice.org to do everything I wanted; partly because I'd never written such a large document before and needed to use features I had never used before, and partly because I ran into a number of bugs and missing or brain-dead features. Some of these may be due to OpenOffice.org's compatibility with Microsoft Word, but in other areas OpenOffice.org appears to lag behind Word slightly. Most of these issues were already reported in the OpenOffice.org project issue tracking database. I have a background in Software Engineering, so I was better placed than most to track down the issues that I ran into, the main ones being:

* Document outlining is half-baked, making numbering and headers difficult.
* Scaling objects in Draw doesn't scale contained text.
* JPEG images from scanners don't crop correctly when inserted as links.
* The layout engine can hang on complex documents.
* Objects don't remain centred when generating HTML for the web.
* You can't easily set the image resolution when exporting from Draw.
* Page Styles don't act hierarchically, making page size changes difficult.
* Putting the page numbers in the header margin was tricky.
* No text-to-speech/screen-reader integration.

I sometimes had paragraphs in sub-documents inadvertently acquire formatting information which the styles in my master document didn't override. I never quite worked out why, and it was often hard to detect this since the difference was not visually obvious and there is no way to identify when formatting has been applied manually vs coming from a style. Removing the manual formatting information from these paragraphs with Format -> Default Formatting fixed the problem; but this also removed formatting like italicisation unless I was paying close attention.

Time spent struggling with these sort of problems was time not spent on writing. Nevertheless, they say “you get what you pay for”, and in this case I got far more than that. OpenOffice.org is free, and I've used expensive old Microsoft Word in the past and had problems with it, too. The other cool thing is that, being an open source project, I could get information about these problems in the issue-tracking database, vote for getting them fixed, and even fix them myself if I really wanted to. And I almost did, but my aim was to write rather than fix bugs, so my motivation ran out. I made this laundry-list of complaints not because I want to be critical or bite the hand that feeds me, but in the hope that they will be prioritised to make OpenOffice.org even better.

If you're interested in using OpenOffice.org to write a book, check out my complete review including some handy tips on my website.

Cheers,
Graham

[foxcole]

I sometimes had paragraphs in sub-documents inadvertently acquire formatting information which the styles in my master document didn't override. I never quite worked out why

In my experience, direct formatting has always been the culprit. If you were to highlight the offending content in the sub document, press Ctrl+Shift+Spacebar and if bullets or numbering are involved, also toggle the toolbar buttons, the direct formatting will be stripped away and the master document can recognize the style and apply the correct definition.

it was often hard to detect this since the difference was not visually obvious

Many calls have been made for a Reveal formatting codes tool. I had heard rumors that someone was developing an Extension but I didn't find anything just searching for "reveal."

As for the HTML issue, there is no code in HTML that centers objects. You have to fake it by using a table, and the export filter can't assume you want or should use a table for any HTML content, or exactly how you'd want to render it. WYS is not always WYG when working with HTML in word processors. Don't do it. Use a dedicated HTML editor. (But I am curious, why did HTML layout matter in writing a book?)

I made this laundry-list of complaints not because I want to be critical or bite the hand that feeds me, but in the hope that they will be prioritised to make OpenOffice.org even better.

This laundry list can be very useful to others who are working in the same version of OOo you used... but you should know that user forums have little or no influence on prioritization of issues in the Issue Tracker. Users need to go there and comment or vote on issues they feel are important, in order to raise popularity levels and raise visibility of the issues. (Just don't comment on things that are already being worked on unless you have useful new information to contribute.)

[jrkrideau]

This is a handy place to send people who ask about OOo's ability to handle large documents or if OOo can be used to write a book. Thanks.

[greyham]

In my experience, direct formatting has always been the culprit. If you were to highlight the offending content in the sub document, press Ctrl+Shift+Spacebar and if bullets or numbering are involved, also toggle the toolbar buttons, the direct formatting will be stripped away and the master document can recognize the style and apply the correct definition.

Perhaps my use of bullets is the culprit here; I could swear I've seen it with regular paragraphs too though. A tool to reveal formatting would be really useful to writers like me. I don't know why directly applying a bullet would cause the font size to be directly applied too; but it seems to happen sometimes.

As for the HTML issue, there is no code in HTML that centers objects.

I'm not sure what you mean here. You don't need to use tables to center objects in HTML. But it is a furphy as far as the book goes; I used to OOo to generate a simple web page for my book, and that's where I came across the centering bug.

you should know that user forums have little or no influence on prioritization of issues in the Issue Tracker. Users need to go there and comment or vote on issues they feel are important, in order to raise popularity levels and raise visibility of the issues.

Hence the links in my original article, so readers who care can do just that. All my votes are used up!

Cheers,
Graham

[gregorylouie]

Hi Graham, Fox,

From your posts, I imagine one or both of you would be able to help me create or modify a book template. Would either of you be willing to share a book template with me or better yet contribute a book template to the OO documentation project?

I am a middle school biotechnology teacher developing an 8th grade biofuels curriculum. I started out in MS Word 2007 and quickly got frustrated trying to maintain a consistent formatting style among the unit summary page, teacher's lesson plans, daily teaching notes and student activity sheets even within a single unit of instruction.

So I started a search for book template and came across several reviews comparing the virtues of Lyx/LaTeX, DocBook and OO 3.0. The availability of a book template (Memoir) for Lyx tempted me for more than a few hours as it provides a seamless integration for the automation of the TOC, style consistency, footnoting, indexing, etc., but the steepness (vertical) of the learning curve compelled me to investigate OO further.

There's quite a few blog posts detailing the ins and outs of customizing paragraph styles and page styles. That is well and good, but I would have to start from scratch and I would much prefer a template that I can modify

I imagine that someone at a University working on a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction would have assembled a book template suitable for my purposes and would be willing to share it. That will take me some time to track down, probably more time than it would take to simply modify an existing book template.

So guys, what do you say? Do you have a book template you would be willing to share? If not, would you know of some other technical writer (preferably one specialized in curriculum design) that might be?

Thank you for considering this post.

[Caracalla]

I could swear I've seen it with regular paragraphs too though. A tool to reveal formatting would be really useful to writers like me.

I've seen the same problem i'm fairly sure. Still haven't been able to figure out what the occurances have in common.

Nice post BtW.

[greyham]

So guys, what do you say? Do you have a book template you would be willing to share? If not, would you know of some other technical writer (preferably one specialized in curriculum design) that might be?

I never got around to creating a useful book template. I use master documents and don't worry about the look and feel of the chapter files, so when I create a new chapter I don't even use a template. When starting a new project, I've tended to just copy and edit an existing master document that looks the way I want. I know that's cheating, but... oh well. One day I might put a template together, but it hasn't happened yet.

Cheers,
Graham

[RGB]

So guys, what do you say? Do you have a book template you would be willing to share?

In my experience, build a template from scratch takes less than 20 minutes, while understanding a template made by anyone else takes a whole evening.
I let to you the math...
Seriously, it is best for you to understand how everything work in Writer before use it in a Big Project, then sit down with some tea thinking how do you want your book looks like and finally build your own template.

[ritergal]

Regarding templates for books, I've done layout for three books now and coached several other people on the process, but I have yet to tackle one in OO. All but one were published commercially. The other I did on Lulu.The first was fifteen years ago when WordPerfect was the rage and I had to use a Master Document. That was hellacious. The others have been in Word, in a single document, and dealing with the section breaks and wandering graphics was hellacious in a different way. Next book I'll try the Master Document route again, though it would be lovely to have section breaks that enabled header changes in OO...

No template would have helped me on these projects. Each one has a unique "look." I set them up with the heirarchical header styles necessary for proper TOC generation. I made lots of unique style for special formatting needs (my books include lots of tables, illustrations and other special case text).

Perhaps what would be more helpful than a template would be a tutorial on working with master documents, setting up the TOC, tagging index entries, and that sort of thing.