I just started using Scrivener for my next book and imported 50+ pages of text and split and organized it. Very impressive and it fits my writing style and work flow MUCH better than a linear word processor. It's still early but given how many pages I've written, rearranged, annotated, etc this is going to cut down my pre-publication time by at least 50%. I tended to format/layout on the fly in Pages too and that really cut into productivity when odd things happened like images jumping to other pages, etc - and these things happened a lot. And being just slightly OCD, my attention would be diverted to "fixing" these issues on the fly. With Scrivener I don't have to worry about that as I'm concentrating on the words and not the layout at the same time.
So here I am with a well organized draft that's about 80% done. The rest is basically simple writing so I'll be done quickly. Now I am thinking about the DLP/page layout step. I recently got Nisus Writer Pro for OSX and it is a few steps above Pages. I certainly could use it but I think I'm ready to explore other options. I'd prefer an OSX-only workflow but I do have Windows 10 too. I don't want to go down the full Adobe InDesign path, too complex and expensive. I looked at Serif PagePlus 9 but 1) it is no longer supported and 2) it doesn't handle footnotes. Here's an example of the first page in the new book so you'l have a general sense of what I want to do. I might want to go with two columns.
- Screen Shot 2017-03-08 at 11.55.09 AM.png (316.79 KiB) Viewed 1890 times
So, I'd like to see if anyone has experience with other OSX or Windows options with the following requirements:
Hard Requirements:
- easily handle 250 pages, 200 photos/images
- auto number footnotes
- auto table of contents generation
- word wrap around non-rectangular images
- ability to do real sidebars for both text and images
- supports left/right pages
- supports single and double columns
- not overly complicated to use
- less than $300US
OSX preferred but Windows 10 if it meets the list of requirements. I've googled until I was blue in the fingers and explored a number of options that all petered out. I ran across Scrivener as part of that search and found it by accident, so I'm hopeful that there might be a DLP option out there with a cult following that I haven't found!
cheers,
Michael
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