Open Source Tools For Publish On Demand

John Bartlett owns and operates Bartlett Publishing, which puts out approximately four titles per year in programming, business, and ... religion. Huh? Those don't go together, do they? This is the strength of small publishing, to bring together the disparate genres that make up a particular publisher's passion.

Bartlett is a true believer, in God and Linux. He chose open source tools because he "believes in free information." He uses the DocBook DTD, running the manuscript through OpenJade with a heavily customized version of Norman Walsh's stylesheets. "Using OpenJade and Norman Walsh's stylesheets to typeset gives me a huge advantage in both costs to produce a book and time to market. In particular, with DocBook, an index is amazingly easy to produce," says Bartlett. Post-processing of the PDF is done with Perl's Text::PDF module and Adobe Acrobat for complex work. A professional graphic artist produces the cover and Bartlett does post-processing with the GIMP. Finally he uploads the finished materials to CafePress or LightningSource.

Bartlett's recommendation of the open source tools he uses is unequivocating. "DocBook makes your book look professional with very little effort. The combination of DocBook and a good cover artist gives you very professional results with a minimum of time and money."

John Culleton of Able Typesetters and Indexers provides services for small- and self-publishers with a completely Linux-based workflow using variants of TeX. First, he keys in and corrects the source text in Gvim. Culleton compiles the text to PDF with ConTeXt or pdfTeX and views the output in Xpdf. He also uses various other bits and pieces: grep; the Ghostscript ps2ascii translator; pfaedit (FontForge); PSUtils for brochures, makeindex for indices, and some custom macros and scripts. He does image processing in the GIMP and has recently begun using Scribus for book covers because it can handle ICC profiles and produce CMYK output.

Culleton makes two points about the strengths of open source software. First, "All of these tools are supported by active email lists. I don't have to call an underpaid clerk.... I get superior support from users and maintainers of the software." (Ask any XPress user about Quark's customer support. It's infamous.) Second, when Donald Knuth backed away from TeX, others picked up the torch. Development continued and TeX is still going strong. Meanwhile, in the proprietary world, PageMaker is dying a slow and painful death and is no longer the behemoth of book production; FrameMaker has been losing ground as well. Adobe now pushes InDesign. QuarkXpress went years between updates on the Mac, still the dominant desktop publishing platform. With proprietary software, Culleton says, "[You] face the potential discontinuance of the product, just like users of the once excellent WordPerfect have found their own purgatory -- the Curse of Corel."