Graphic Design Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Graphic Design professionals, students, and enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I'm creating a booklet on teaching programming through examples and exercises. What's the best software for writing the pages? It'll be code examples, exercise questions and some diagrams.
I'm new to designing and writing an instructional booklet. Would Adobe's InDesign or QuarkXPress be appropriate for this kind of job?
It's tricky to make a recommendation. You say "booklet", which implies a small project, but I assume if it's successful you won't stop at one. Here's the thing: no matter what software you use, you're faced with a significant investment of time learning to use the application, and from a practical standpoint I consider that a very important consideration. I'm pragmatic. What will get the product out the door at the quality I need in the shortest amount of time is what I will always go with, even if (as has happened) I have to learn a whole new application to get there.
Several other answers here give you some insights. I don't want to detract from them.
Here are my suggestions, with the reasons why, so you can make your own judgment.
For authoring the text, use the word processor you're most familiar with. It doesn't matter much what it is, because its sole purpose is to get the text together. The shorter the learning curve, the better. If you're a whiz with a good code editor, that's going to work for you better than Scrivener, Scribus or Word if you have to learn them before you can get up to speed. (If you're already up to speed on LaTeX, you're miles ahead of the curve, but it doesn't sound like you are.)
For layout, I would highly recommend InDesign, not because it's the best possible tool (Framemaker or LaTeX would make some tasks simpler, especially if you were going deeply into long textbook authoring), but because it will get the job done and the effective and useful learning resources at your disposal are easily ten times what's out there for other possibilities. InDesign is a fairly steep learning curve, but LaTeX and Framemaker are, frankly, a cliff. The sheer quantity of excellent training resources for InDesign, and the huge and active community that surrounds it, make it my "Editor's Choice" for a newcomer to page layout.
GREP styles in InDesign are easy for anyone half-way familiar with regular expressions, and you can build a library of queries and styles based on regex which are portable from project to project. Do them once, and you have them forever.
Quark Xpress is a powerful layout program. It's been overtaken by InDesign because it has less support, doesn't have the intensely powerful integration of the Creative Suite, and its training resources are now completely overshadowed by InDesign. I don't personally know anyone who's switched from Quark to ID who would ever switch back.
Yes, absolutely. Either of those programs will give you complete flexibility over where you put the diagrams and how they're sized, how the text does or doesn't wrap around them, the font and indents of the code sections, headers and footers, how pages break, and so forth.
Word is for writing letters and legal documents, not for page layout. Illustrator may allow you to create diagrams (depending on what they are), but it's vastly easier to do a multi-page document in either InDesign or Quark.
I truly despise Microsoft Word from a pre-press standpoint, but I have to disagree with the comment above. If you are an advanced user with Microsoft Word it can be a very useful program to create multiple page technical documents. Sometimes I actually prefer to use Microsoft Word based on it's integration with Excel and chart input. I love InDesign/Quark from a design standpoint, but for technical writing I would prefer Microsoft Word. It all depends on your own comfort level with each of the programs. If you have worked in Microsoft Word in the past and are comfortable with your experience level in that program, I would not suggest straying from that if you are creating a very time intensive multi-page document. However if you are not an advanced user of Word then it can't hurt to try a different program since it will take you the same amount of time to stumble through Word as it would to learn Quark or InDesign.
While Indesign or XPress would be decent tools to use.... Actually, for text books and manuals I highly recommend Adobe Framemaker. Few have ever heard of Frammaker but it's been around for many, mnay years. It's specifically designed to handle book content that has a great many internal references and call outs such as technical manuals.
I've used an prefer InDesign for book layouts (300+ pages). The Page Masters, Paragraph/Character Styles, and grep styles are pretty easy to use and provide great control of your formatting. I advise setting up your master pages and styles before getting to far on the project to be able to most efficiently apply your formatting.
As Mentioned indesignsecrets is a great resources. So is, layersmagazine and creativepro
"What's the best software for writing"
That's a much different question than what the best question for page/document/book layout is.
For writing, it's your personal preference. Whichever word processor gives you the features and flexibility needed to write. As long as it can export into a file format that a page layout software can use, you should be good to go.
As for laying out the book, InDesign is pretty much the standard these days. QuarkXPress can work as well.
