by smIsle on Mon Nov 10, 2008 7:17 pm
I've found OpenOffice Writer to be very good, once you get the hang of it. It takes thinking ahead and math to make a book that follows design standards, where inDesign does all the work for you. If you learn to use Writer's styles feature, and all of the formatting quirks, you can come out with something that looks like it was made by a printing house. Writer also has a built in imposition feature (you get to it from the print preview screen) that works very well if you are printing on a home printer. I would NEVER use their built in PDF printer though. If you are looking for a free PDF printer, cutePDF is good (as far as I've seen).
I've made a book using the print to PDF, rearrange the pages method, and I will never do it again.