Suggest an editor better than Office and offliner than GoogleDocs

[Kulebron]

I need to make heavily illustrated books (both paid and hobby work), such that I can both print and share online as PDF. My current workhorse is Google Docs. But it has some shortcomings, and I'd prefer an offline editor. LibreOffice Writer is as awful as MS Word. Once I used Adobe Indesign, but for my case this is heavy: need to run a virtual Windows machine, and there's no chance of collaborative editing.

(I have to note that LibreOffice team did a great work repeating everything in MS Office, including all the bad things, and making exactly zero improvements.)

Things I want:

* easy styling and clonetitles (Writer has this, but Google Docs improved it by a notch putting this part of UI on a diet. The simpler interface made it easy to use. InDesign complicated this part, which is too much for me.)

* perfect images snapping, like in Google Docs. They did it very well! Nothing starts moving madly like in Writer (Word).

* image cropping (Again, Google Docs is a great example. I could not find this in LibreOffice, 'cause it had to be exactle the same as outdated MS Office.)

I also use SublimeText quite a lot and value its features like line moving (shift+ctrl+up/down).

The main problem with Google Docs is that I often need to work in transport, and 3G works not so well. Another difficulty is keyboard shortcuts that are shared with browser.

Can someone suggest editors capable of doing such tasks? (But please, no latex and other BSDM stuff. )

[CaptainKipard]

Writer has grid snapping. What makes you say that everything starts moving wildly? I've not had this problem.

Why not just crop in Paint or GIMP?

[Kulebron]

Well, when you add images, it tries to make text flow around it. When you add just one image, it's ok. If you have 1-2 images per page, things start being tricky: images try to flow around also, and since the new image is anchored to some place in text, the anchor moves to another page, Writer re-flows text, and puts the image in some weird place.

I use GIMP but when you need 50-100 images in one document, this is too much. Switching back and forth between editors is hard. gThumb easies things a bit (crop is easier), but you still have some difficulties: you need to save image as new file (because you can't save in place to prevent errors, and if you suggest Git/Mercurial, I do use them too, but this is too much for doing in an editor.)

[Geneborg]

Hm, could it be you want something more like "MS Publisher"....Magazine layout software? Haven't used it for quite some time (newer versions), but it should do the trick.

[Nibb31]

I don't know about Publisher, but I think it's more DTP than word processing.

Serious writers use Adobe FrameMaker or XML (DITA) or both (FrameMaker works in its own native "unstructured" mode or DITA mode). MS Word and office suites are good for writing letters or short reports, but to write a book you need the proper tools.

As a technical writer myself, I strongly recommend Frame for what you want to do. It's book-oriented, meaning that you typically work with chapter files. Images and illustrations can be externalized (you use links instead of embedding them into your files). It is strongly style-oriented, which means that you might spend a lot of time setting up the styles and formatting at the beginning, and then you only concentrate on the content. Frame is very powerful once you understand how it works, but it takes some getting used to, especially if you bring in some bad habits from Word. I strongly suggest following some courses if you go that route.

Edited October 6, 2014 by Nibb31

[Kulebron]

Ok, will check both Publisher and FrameMaker. Thanks!

[cantab]

I absolutely agree that picture positioning in MS Word, and LibO/OO Writer for that matter, is a nightmare. But then maybe as Gene suggested, if you're concerned about layout and graphics then a desktop publishing program rather than a word processor would be more suitable.

Been a while since I used MS Publisher, it should be OK. Not spectacular, but OK. I've used Scribus and don't really recommend that, it felt very over-complicated for what I did.

Scrivener is very popular for novel writers, but I don't know how good its handling of graphics is. If you take a write first, add pictures afterwards approach it might be useful.

And I have used LaTeX. It was a different experience, more of a write-test-debug kind of cycle, rather than the "fighting" that I felt I was doing with word processors. It's not, I think, a good choice if you want to insist yourself exactly where each image goes.

Edited October 6, 2014 by cantab