Book writer's templates

[jeb]

I have started writing a book and before I get too far into it I have been searching on how to set up MSWord to do so. What I have found so far does not look too promising as apparently Word does not have a ready made template to do so. (I have Office 2003 and Word SP-3)

I also write a tech article every month for a local community news paper and last month recommended OpenOffice as a program to take a look at. Having Office, I admit I have not spent a lot of time with OP but it has received many great reviews.

My question - does OP offer a ready made template for writing a book and, if not, would you still recommend OP over Word to spend the time to set one or the other up?

Tks much - jb

[RoryOF]

Quie honestly, you don't need a template for writing a book. All you need is a text editor - notepad would do! Get a template by all means. Spend your time pfaffing about with making it look nice, if you must. Your publisher will strip all that out and do his own formatting. If you want to publish it yourself, the layout is secondary to your text. You've got to have the text before you do a final layout. For that, you need a template.

[jeb]

Tks, Rory - but it would be nice to be able to move chapters around and have them change in the TOC automatically, be able to send things to the index, etc. without having to do all that by cut and paste. - jb

[RoryOF]

There are some templates at
http://templates.services.openoffice.or ... y/term/170

They seem to be a mixed bag!

[franx]

Hi,
that may also be of interest to you →
Open Office Writers

[jeb]

tks, guys - I appreciate the help. - jb

[TheRealOrion]

So what you're asking for is a template that contains chapters and automatically has a header in it, and such? Give this one a try. I made it using the MLA formatting standards. Each file is assumed to be a chapter in a book. It has a table of contents at the top and also has autonumbered headings already built-in. It's just what I banged together for my own use, but it might give you a place to start. You can join the chapters using Master Documents, or just cut/paste them all into a single file. In the end, I'd highly recommend that you make your own templates, though. As Rory says, a publisher will strip all that anyway, so if it's just for your own use then you'll want to customise it to your needs.

Hope that's helpful!

[RoryOF]

I'm pondering a giant macro that asks a few questions
Title?
Author?
Publishing details?
Dedication?
Preface?
Introduction?
Table of contents?
Table of Illustrations?
Table of Figures?
Number of chapters?
Chapter Subtitles?
Number of Appendices?
Endnotes?
Bibliography?
Index?

Most of these are Yes/No answers or a number.
You answer all these questions and it produces a Master document and sub documents with the pages set to appropriate styles and you just fill in the blanks. Unfortunately, to do it I need to learn OO macro programming (25 years since I did any), and I'd rather get on with my own writing instead.

I don't have to worry about publishers stripping all my formating, as I either circulate as .pdf files or do limited runs on my own laser printer.

[morlock9]

Well worth it to spend the time making your own template- using Master Document and having each chapter be a separate file, or subdocument. Indexing and generating a Table of Contents is then easy.
The most difficult concept for me was the use of headings (heading 1) for chapter titles. The proper use of them gives you your Master Document Table of Contents and sequential numbering.
If you are a professional writer, time invested in learning the OO template system is time wisely invested indeed.

[Helge]

If you are writing a thesis or another kind of academic book I could recommend a template made by the University of Uppsala in Sweden: http://beta.ub.uu.se/sv/Service/Publice ... PDF-filer/. The page is in Swedish but if you download all the files with the name openoffice.org in the right pane you will get the template and instructions. They are in Swedish and English. The template use macros.
The page does not say anything about using the template outside Uppsala University. The page is freely accessible from outside the University. Therefore I guess that anyone can use the template.
I think this is one of the best book templates I have seen in Openoffice. The University of Uppsala has done a good job and many thesis will be written in OpenOffice!

[hogwaump]

I just finished writing a book using OpenWriter. After thrashing about with the concept of templates and such, I ended up just doing chapters as individual files. In my outline, I created a hyperlink to each file just under each major section title. This allows you to move chapters around with relative ease, just by moving sections in the outline. Also, OpenWriter slows down horrendously as file sizes grow, at least on my machine. Breaking it into separate chapter files sped up the writing/editing process.

I hoped to link everything together in the end by creating a file of nothing but a list of sections, with one hyperlink per section. That didn't work out so well, at least in version 3.0.1 - for some reason it seemed to lose track of chapter and page numbers at some point in the middle of the manuscript. It was a good system for writing, but not so hot for printing.

[morlock9]

I can't believe you went to all that trouble and didn't use Master Document.

[RoryOF]

I can't believe you went to all that trouble and didn't use Master Document.

A recent document from Sun on the subject of using OpenOffcce for the production of large documents is strongly against Master Documents when there is only one author involved, It admits that Master Documents are useful when there are multiple authors, perhaps in different locations, but for a single author it feels that the one file method is best. For large (non Master) Documents it recommends Linking all graphics to keep file size down.

[amauriced]

You don't need a template necessarily. Here is an excellent tutorial for setting up a book on Open Office:

http://maketecheasier.com/layout-a-book ... 2009/07/13

[martinhansell]

If you are writing a thesis or another kind of academic book I could recommend a template made by the University of Uppsala in Sweden: http://beta.ub.uu.se/sv/Service/Publice ... PDF-filer/. T.....
....The page does not say anything about using the template outside Uppsala University. The page is freely accessible from outside the University. Therefore I guess that anyone can use the template.

Hi,

The page is no longer freely accessible. Do you by any chance have a copy of it?

Thanks
Martin

[RoryOF]

Try
http://www.ub.uu.se/sv/Service/Publicer ... PDF-filer/

The file and instructions are linked on RHside.

[munchkyn]

You don't need a template necessarily. Here is an excellent tutorial for setting up a book on Open Office:

http://maketecheasier.com/layout-a-book ... 2009/07/13

Oh, Lord. He sets up a "book" template to reproduce the effect of typesetting on his manuscript, so it doesn't seem to take as long to produce his page count. This is so many kinds of wrong it's hard to know where to start.

Professional editors care about word count. They take your word count and plug it into their own formula, which varies from house to house, to come up with "their" page count. That is part of the production process. The production process is no part of the writer's job. The writer's job is to produce a manuscript, and most editors prefer a standard page with 1.5 inch margins, double spaced, with a half-inch paragraph indent in an easy to read font like Courier 12. That is the only "template" you need.Futzing around with formats and fonts and what have you is a colossal timewaster for writers.

[Seal948]

Ah, but with the growing POD aspects in the publishing industry, a writer's job can and does become much more complex than just writing the manuscript. Typesetting, layout, images and illustrations as well as preparation of the cover art and design ARE part of the writer's job. I am currently finishing up a book that covers all these aspects for individuals wanting to publish their own book using their own publishing arm AND do it with OpenOffice. I will be supplying a basic template for download to registered users of my book. The templates will include pages for the front matter, interior files, and back matter as well as a template for a 5.25x8 trade size cover. Both can easily be converted to other sizes with minimum effort.

The purpose of the book is to provide the tools necessary to publish a book that doesn't look homemade AND do it at a reasonable price without the use of a vanity press. While this is my first non-fiction book, I have written 2 this year and helped bring 15 others to market since May 2009.

Steve

[Codemonkey]

For a simple vanilla template: http://www.lulu.com/product/file-downlo ... ate/107151

[fionbharr]

Really; while I love OO.o and have been using it since way back in the pre 2.0-era, using a Wordprocessor to format a book simply isn't the route to go.
A Text-editor is a book-writer's best friend. Raw ASCII text is what is best for generating content. The publisher and printer will work together to format the end-result. "Content is King," and all that.
A good text-editor application will let the writer manage sections/chapters, re-arrange whole swaths of text, and edit in ways that puts MS Office and OpenOffice.org to shame. (Really; once you see regex editing on texts as done by a master, it looks like magic.)
You can *help* the process along if you have printing-industry standard codes embedded in your text (think "dot commands" or TeX markup), but it's not necessary.
Publishing and Writing are completely separate activites; it's a crying shame that WYSIWYG wordprocessors continue to conflate the two.

[floris v]

Very good points, and welcome to the forum.