LIBREOFFICE

Have you ever wanted to publish your own book? Michael Reed demonstrates that all of the tools you need exist on Linux.

So, you want to write and then self-publish a book? Then Linux has all of the tools that you need. In this case, we’re going to cover a workflow using the LibreOffice office suite (www. libreoffice.org) for the writing and the book’s layout. There are two main types of book publishing: print and electronic (ebook), and we’re going to look at an approach that works equally well for both. Fortunately, as long as you produce standards-compliant files, the publisher won’t care if you used open source software on Linux rather than ‘industry-standard’ proprietary software on Windows or a Mac.

OUR EXPERT

Michael Reed likes to keep his style up to date… but that’s for text layout rather than fashion purposes.

PUBLISHING IN LIBREOFFICE

1 The Menu Bar

2 The Styles Pull-Down Menu.

We’re going to spend quite a lot of time with this as we’re big fans of using styles to control the look of the text.

3 Formatting Toolbar.

Use this to make on-the-spot changes to the look of the text, but always consider creating or modifying a style if you can.

4 The Navigator.

This is a section browser and fairly essential for zipping around a long document like a book. Press F5 to switch it on.

5 The Main Text Area.

LibreOffice Writer is a “what you see is what you get” environment, giving you some feedback on what your changes will look like.

6 The Status Bar.

The word count and page count should keep you motivated while you’re writing.

Rather than write a book from scratch, for this tutorial we’ve grabbed the text from a book that’s now It’s quite the labyrinth of features with some long menu-entry names! in the public domain, and we’re going to run through everything it took to turn the plain text of that into a properly formatted book using the Writer component of LibreOffice. The Brick Moon by author Edward Everett Halet was first serialised in 1869, and at around 25,000 words and divided into four chapters, it’s classed as a novella rather than a full-length novel. That makes it a good length for learning the ropes of creating a book in LibreOffice. At the same time, this project also has a lot in common with other book types such as full-length novels, collections of short stories, autobiographies or various types of non-fiction books.

LibreOffice is available in the repository of nearly all Linux distributions. Start with a blank Writer document. Preferably, work with its native ODT document format when saving.

Have some style

We strongly recommend using styles to control the document’s appearance and layout wherever possible. For example, if you want to change the font then first highlight an area of the text, change the font using the toolbar, and then update that style to change the look of all similar text.