Typesetting Program?

[eli]

[KARL]

[nermander]

[permtilperm]

For Windows XP I have used ClickBook from Blue Squirrel for some time now - cost is about USD 50.

It's a kind of virtual printer that is installed - you just make your pages in any word processor or text editor, and at print-out you can choose page sizes, sheets per signature etc. All within the final printers real paper sheet limitations of course.

Works great for me.

[julies]

Hi - I've found the folks over at Typesetter Forum to be very helpful with questions such as this...well worth checking out and bookmarking for future reference:

[smIsle]

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.

[permtilperm]

I have tried the feature that's available in the preview mode in OO Writer 3.0.
But I couldn't figure out that it was possible to have pages in correct order for folding (and/or cutting) to make signatures.
Maybe one have to arrange the page order in the document itself ?
Or am I missing something in the OO Writers features ??

It would have been nice if OOW had these imposition features - in the meantime I stick to make ordinary documents with pages in straight order and use ClickBook as printer. Works like a dream - even if ClickBook have some odd behaviour in some situations. It's cheap, and features for making signatures are flexible - and the printed result is nice.