If you saw my previous post about self-publishing my C# programming manual on Amazon.com's Kindle, then you would know it was a large project.
The book, now divided into 3 volumes, 28 chapters, has passed 1,800 pages. The last time I counted, it had nearly 1,000 illustrations.
A serious document that no traditional publisher would touch. Plus, it was a crowded market with lots of similar titles. But I know my book is one of the better ones out there....
After all this work, I still want the programming manual out in the real world. Because of this, I chose to publish each chapter as a separate Kindle title, charging $2 or $3 -- making for a low-cost of entry.
Editing 28 individual documents would have been a chore -- I needed to work with them as one large, multi-chapter book because page-numbering, TOC's and Indexes needed to span chapters.
How did I manage? WordPerfect!
WordPerfect?
Most of you just snorted. "Tim still uses WordPerfect? Sheese!"
Microsoft Word would die on a document like this -- and I would still be cursing squirrelly graphics and bullet-lists. I stand by my guns here. WP knows how to handle complicated documents.
Case-in-point, today I was editing Volume 1, an 800-page documents behemoth (a master, with subdocuments, all expanded and all visible).
Scrolling is effortless, moving from top-to-bottom and anywhere in-between, without delays.All edits and graphic changes are perfectly tracked. Font and margin changes are made in the master document - one change and all chapters change.
A click of the mouse re-generates the Table-of-Contents and the index rebuilds with a concordance file; this takes about 5 seconds. Let me remind you, this is on an 800+ page document, with hundreds of tables, margin changes, and the like -- and all the graphics are right where they are supposed to be, flowing with the text without a problem.
When I save, each chapter parks itself out to the disk as a separate file and I don't have to keep track of them. If I want, I can edit the chapters individually -- but seldom do.
WP to PDF to Kindle - Easy Cheesy
From the master document, I printed each chapter using WordPerfect's PDF option, and fed the results into the Kindle Text Book Creator. The result - a perfect document, exactly as formatted. Uploaded to Amazon, clicked Publish, and was done. Super easy and kind-of-fun.
Even if I were using Word, I would still print to PDF and then import into Kindle -- this saves the formatting and graphic positions. (But if I were using Word, the documents would not be as well-behaved. Yes, I am opinionated about this.)
What is my point? Don't be a snob and say Microsoft Word is the only word processor for you. WordPerfect Student/Home is $50 -- and it saves in DOCX format. If you are frustrated with your current word processor, try someone else.
Related Keyliner Articles:
Publishing Text books and Comic books to Kindle
WordPerfect Reviews X5 - X8
WordPerfect for School Papers
WordPerfect Protecting Text across page boundaries
Shameless Amazon link: A Beginner's Guide to C-Sharp Programming
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2/134-2760193-8662735?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=ABGC
The book, now divided into 3 volumes, 28 chapters, has passed 1,800 pages. The last time I counted, it had nearly 1,000 illustrations.
A serious document that no traditional publisher would touch. Plus, it was a crowded market with lots of similar titles. But I know my book is one of the better ones out there....
After all this work, I still want the programming manual out in the real world. Because of this, I chose to publish each chapter as a separate Kindle title, charging $2 or $3 -- making for a low-cost of entry.
Editing 28 individual documents would have been a chore -- I needed to work with them as one large, multi-chapter book because page-numbering, TOC's and Indexes needed to span chapters.
How did I manage? WordPerfect!
WordPerfect?
Most of you just snorted. "Tim still uses WordPerfect? Sheese!"
Microsoft Word would die on a document like this -- and I would still be cursing squirrelly graphics and bullet-lists. I stand by my guns here. WP knows how to handle complicated documents.
Case-in-point, today I was editing Volume 1, an 800-page documents behemoth (a master, with subdocuments, all expanded and all visible).
Scrolling is effortless, moving from top-to-bottom and anywhere in-between, without delays.All edits and graphic changes are perfectly tracked. Font and margin changes are made in the master document - one change and all chapters change.
A click of the mouse re-generates the Table-of-Contents and the index rebuilds with a concordance file; this takes about 5 seconds. Let me remind you, this is on an 800+ page document, with hundreds of tables, margin changes, and the like -- and all the graphics are right where they are supposed to be, flowing with the text without a problem.
When I save, each chapter parks itself out to the disk as a separate file and I don't have to keep track of them. If I want, I can edit the chapters individually -- but seldom do.
WP to PDF to Kindle - Easy Cheesy
From the master document, I printed each chapter using WordPerfect's PDF option, and fed the results into the Kindle Text Book Creator. The result - a perfect document, exactly as formatted. Uploaded to Amazon, clicked Publish, and was done. Super easy and kind-of-fun.
Even if I were using Word, I would still print to PDF and then import into Kindle -- this saves the formatting and graphic positions. (But if I were using Word, the documents would not be as well-behaved. Yes, I am opinionated about this.)
What is my point? Don't be a snob and say Microsoft Word is the only word processor for you. WordPerfect Student/Home is $50 -- and it saves in DOCX format. If you are frustrated with your current word processor, try someone else.
Related Keyliner Articles:
Publishing Text books and Comic books to Kindle
WordPerfect Reviews X5 - X8
WordPerfect for School Papers
WordPerfect Protecting Text across page boundaries
Shameless Amazon link: A Beginner's Guide to C-Sharp Programming
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2/134-2760193-8662735?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=ABGC
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