Looking for suggestions on starting to working on a book...

[Ps23Rick]

I'm helping a friend with a book and have the text and rough formatting as done in Word. I've done this in Word before and really dislike that environment and decided to use Mellel..

But this is the first time I'm really using Mellel to a more full degree aside from just the basics.. I'm learning about character & paragraph styles, how they're related and so forth.

I created a template just fine using my limited knowledge of Mellel but when I wanted to insert a TOC it didn't like it as apparently I wasn't using auto-titles. So, another area of Mellel that I'm not familiar with.

With that said, I was just wondering if anyone has gone through this before and has any best practices or lessons learned they can share. Yes, I'll be looking at the book template that comes with Mellel and I'll have to figure out what I missed and so forth... For my test template I created a bunch of new styles from scratch not using any of the existing which is probably my problem area..

Regardless, any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

Also -- if you have any suggestions for dealing with multi-lingual book versions (in this case I mean different file versions of the same book written in different languages), that would be especially apropos as I'm sure this book will be in multiple languages (e.g. French, Spanish, Tagalog, and a few others) eventually.

-- Rick

[Amontillado]

I like the division of labor. Styles set appearance. Auto-titles set structure.

Think about auto-titles almost like mini-macros. If you enter a chapter title as just a style, it's just text.

If you use an auto-title for a chapter heading, it inserts document variables, the chapter number, and anything else you specify in the definition of the auto-title. Plus, it will appear in the table of contents.

The format of an auto-title is separately defined for the Main Format (how it appears in your text), the table of contents, mentions (headers or footers that carry the chapter title), cross references, and in the outline (the outline tab of the side panel).

References allow you to insert things like "See chapter titled Whatever on page 19". If you change the title of the chapter, all references to it will track along with the new title.

There is a Mellel YouTube series on auto-titles. Just search YouTube for "Mellel Auto-Titles". It explains the concepts well.

[Ps23Rick]

Thanks.. will keep all that in mind! I’ll admit that before i popped all this into Mellel, I was toying around with LaTeX (using memoir class) but thought that some of the things my friend would want to do would be somewhat difficult in LaTeX so switched to Mellel. I will have to play around with headers/footers as I really liked the style that I had with LaTeX which just looked nice and elegant perhaps.

Anyway, I’m staying w/ Mellel and we’ll see how things go. Thanks again!

[Marsilius]

For articles to be published in journals or books, I write as much as I can (including footnotes from Bookends) before exporting to Word.

If I export to word and go back to Mellel, then I usually have trouble getting back to my Mellel environment. Probably because I am a bit disorganized.

So I try to stay in Mellel as long as possible, with the assumption that once I export to Word, I might be staying there.

If I need to make a major revision or addition, I do it in a separate new Mellel doc.

Also, I try to format as much as I can in Mellel according to any stylesheets or thesis guidelines from the beginning so I have less to change later.

[Ps23Rick]

Thanks! I’ll keep that in mind!!