What kind of software is good for formatting?

If you have MSWord it can do most of the basic formatting you would need, but I'm not familiar with Works.

In Open Office you can skip the header on the early pages by using a different style for those pages - try Using Custom Styles in the OpenOffice documentation

Does Open Office not have section breaks? My understanding was it did most of the things MS Word did, in which case it should have section breaks. In MS Word section breaks can be inserted using the Insert menu.

Do this:

Set your document to use mirror margins.

Create your title page and/or copyright page. Neither of these pages generally need headers. Insert a section break (next page section break) at the end of your copyright page.

After the section break is inserted, set up the header/footer of the new section (the section which is chapter one of your book).

First make sure that the header/footers are not set to duplicate the header/footer in your first section. In MS Word you can do this by going into the header/footer and toggling off a button called "Same as Previous" on the header/footer toolbar (which is only visible when you're in the header/footer).

Once that is done, set up your header/footer by selecting 'Different First Page' in your page options, then creating the headers for the pages which are not the first page. You will need to create a header/footer for the odd pages, and a header/footer for the even pages.

Go to the end of chapter one and insert another section break. This time you don't need to toggle off the same as previous header/footer, as you want it to be the same as previous (unless you're being extra fancy and doing the chapter headings in the header). The page numbering should automatically continue from the previous section, but if it doesn't go into the page number options and select "Continue numbering".

Repeat for each chapter.

I've never used Open Office, but my understanding is that it's near identical to MS Word 2000.

If you want it to look as professional as possible, the software you need is Adobe Indesign (the industry standard). It's doable with Microsoft Word; I think Aaron Shepard's blog has some information on it. http://www.newselfpublishing.com/blog/

InDesign. Anything else and you are just begging for frustration.

zpeteman said:

InDesign. Anything else and you are just begging for frustration.

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Absolutely.

As for InDesign - if you want proper kerning and you don't know how to use MS Word well, then it's definitely a primary option.

kurzon said:

As for InDesign - if you want proper kerning and you don't know how to use MS Word well, then it's definitely a primary option.

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It's also pretty complex.

If you don't know how to use MS Word or Word Perfect well, then a professional level typesetting and layout program is not a light thing to learn.

It assumes you already know the basics of typesetting and design. I would think very carefully about spending the money. You might do better to hire someone, or read about what's possible with MSWord.

Yup - I only use MS Word, but I'm an advanced Word user (and I am not so particular about kerning).

mgencleyn said:

Yuck. It's looks good, but the price is yuck. I downloaded the trial and will see happens. Thanks, everyone.

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If you know what you are doing and you only want to do one book, it's probably doable using the 1-month trial. I made a trailer for a book using a trial of Adobe Flash. I had all the artwork prepared and the sequence planned beforehand, and I taught myself Flash and put the thing together in the month. I looked and looked beforehand, but none of the free software for making Flash was good enough.

Go with InDesign. Set up your Master pages, margins, and text frames. And remember, Optical Kerning and Optical Margin Alignment are your friends. Oh, and be sure to TURN OFF LIGATURES!!!! Unless you want ligatures, but even for an old-fashioned guy, I don't like them. Oh and don't forget your justification and leading.

Word Spacing: 95%, 100%, 105%
Letter Spacing: -5%, 0%, 5%
Glyph Scaling: 98%, 100%, 102%

Other things: look up 'Baselines' and set accordingly. I lost about a month of man-hours because I didn't know about this.

Regards,

Jack

Just a word about InDesign. Try your community college, I found that our local community college offers a basic course as a non-credit class. The class isn't expensive either.
Just an FYI for those of us (like me) who would be lost trying to learn it on our own or feel it would be to daunting to try.

You can also get an academic discount if you are a student or have a kid in school. I get a homeschool disocunt on all our software and it is sweet.

But as far as InDesign - way overkill if you ask me. It is good for printing to the proper PDF format and making covers and stuff - but I have Adobe Acrobat Pro Extended so making printer quality PDF's isn't a issue.

And you can get a free trial of flash videos on how to use InDesign here: http://www.vtc.com/

I use Word for all my books though - so much easier.

InDesign C5 and training videos are the best writing investment I've ever made. Oh, and my Macbook.