: What software to use to transcribe a book? I have an older book (it isn't copyrighted), and as a certain tribute and preservation, I'd like to transcribe this book to a digital form. I was

@Jessie844

Looking at the popularity of the gutenberg-project and their approach, I'd suggest to use a simple, plain old text editor -- shipped with every Windows, Mac and Linux-system. In doing so, you


don't mess up the content with any design
keep it simple for re-use in whatever software you like to design it with later
have a pretty small file size
are absolutely exchangable with other systems
you are not distracted by design-options while transcribing the book (!)

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@RJPawlick971

I'm not entirely sure what you are asking, but it sounds like you want to be able to retain the text of the book in a format that is flexible, and have some (relative) longevity to it.

Based on that, you're going to want to try and find the most basic and universal file format you can that will give you the features you need.

.doc/x is a fine format, albeit a proprietary one. You may instead want to go the .rtf route or, some form of SGML (HTML or XML perhaps). (Note that while .docx is claimed by MicroSoft to be XML, it's not really a useful XML format for universal sharing).

This is different than actually typesetting and designing your document, however. For that, you'd use a separate piece of software, importing your raw content to then manipulate it. That may be Word again. Or InDesign. Or LaTeX. Or Scribus. Or...

This way you have the raw data that will likely outlive any specific page layout/typesetting application and is flexible enough that other future applications can import and use it.

In summary, you want a nice text editor/word processor to do the transcribing part. The design part is a separate step.

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@Kevin459

Since you're asking on Graphic Design, I assume you are more interested in typesetting / layout than "which program is the best for typing into". In that case, I recommend using LaTeX. You basically use any text editor; it's a "language" that allows you to specify the text layout easily, and there are converters to portable formats such as PDF and the like.

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@Megan533

If it's mostly text, MS Word is probably best for a couple of reasons:


1) You're probably much more familiar with that than InDesign (my preference) or other similar pieces of software.
2) MS Word will let you output to the various mobile devices (Kindle and their ilk use a specific set of .pdf settings)
3) You can also output to .pdf for self-publishing services such as Lulu or print the dang thing out on your home printer.



My only reservation with this is that if you have any images in the document you may find it more of a pain than it's worth to try and lay images out in Word. Also, it may be difficult to get high-res images to output to your liking if they're embedded in the text flow (MS Word is, first and foremost, a word processor).

If you're willing to spend the time to learn InDesign (I am assuming you don't work with it regularly; if you do than ignore the above and go straight for InDesign) the time investment is more than worth it. Not only will you have better tools for handling image placement and output but it'll be easier to change the output size and keep everything looking nice.

There's unfortunately no panacea that will let you change document size at will; you're always going to run into issues of text flow around images and just scaling everything isn't going to work since not all of the output solutions you mentioned have the same aspect ratio.

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