My new book on gimp is going well so far. I've received a template with styles for OpenOffice from the publisher that I need to use. Up to this point I've been doing everything in vi. They probably wouldn't appreciate the book being submitted that way, though I do get to submit myarticles in plain ol' text.

What I've found is that there is a fairly productive process I can use to write this book. The book is divided into sections, with each section containing a series of very short chapters. What I've done is outline the sections and chapters, created a series of directories for each section, created a series of directories for each chapter and started writing each chapter in plain text.

Once a chapter is written (sans images), I remove newlines from paragraphs and run it through aspell. I have some small, XML'ish looking markup in there as well but I'm leaving that in there for when (if ever) the chapters go online. After spell checking the next step is importing into the OOo templates.

For each chapter I create a new OOo file and load the style sheet from the publisher. I import the text file, remove the XML'ish stuff and add formatting to fit the publishers requirements based on that style sheet. This part is the easiest since there is little editing to be done. Most of this is just a reformating of paragraphs as body text or production directives.

Each chapter is scanned for index entries. Inserting index entries is easy but it helps to turn on Field Shadings so you can see which words are being included in the index. For each chapter you just need to insert the words in the index. You do not actuallycreate an index. That is done in the Master Document.

Since each chapter gets it's own OOo file, I needed to create a Master Document (MD). This is a special OOo document that binds all the individual files together and allows you to create master Table of Contents and Indexes. The MD is saved as a special file in the top level directory for the book. It initially contains nothing. As each chapter is imported and saved as an OOo file, it is inserted into the MD. Chapters are stacked in the MD and moving them around is just a matter of changing their position in the stack using the Navigator. A Table of Contents and an Index are created and moved to their proper locations.

As updates are made to existing chapters I simply run updates on the chapter in the MD, then update the ToC and indexes.

All of this OOo stuff took about a day to learn. I knew a little about creating indexes previously but had no idea how to handle multiple documents. It turns out to be pretty easy.

The next phase will be inserting images into the chapters. Hopefully that will be easy too, though the whole “what DPI should I use” issue will likely be raised. I know how this is handled in page layout tools, but OOo is not a page layout tool. So we'll see how much trouble I get into there.

Then, in the end, I have to figure out how to submit the whole thing to the publisher. Will linked files be lost if the absolute directory paths change? I dunno. But I'll find out. Eventually. I only have about 8 months to do this thing, and submissions start pouring in long before that.