How long does it take to format a book in LaTeX?

Question

I am new to this website and I hope this is not considered off topic but how long does it take to format a book in LaTeX?

I understand this is a subjective question but maybe the "specs" of the book can make it less subjective. I do not have a lot of experience with LaTeX other than formatting posts over at math.se. Currently the book is in a .doc format and I am currently using a createspace template. The book is a non-fiction book.

160 Pages
Size: 5 x 8
Chapters 8
Contains few diagrams (maybe 5) Contains very little Math
The book does not have any footnotes

If you need anymore information, I would be more than happy to provide it.

Thanks a lot for your time!

Answer 1

I can speak of a real experience with .doc to .tex conversion. The simple rule I have observed is: 5-10 minutes a page, if things go fluently.

What exactly is fluently (and how much more do the non-fluent things take):

• no complicated math, i.e. no large matrices, no equations to be broken to multiple lines etc. (add 5-20 minutes per one complicated equation)

• well prepared bibliography in bibTeX, JabRef or similar (add 2-5 minutes for each "bad" bibliography item)

• printer-ready pictures, i.e. diagrams in vector format, photos in good quality etc. (add X minutes per one, where X is very dependent on the situation)

• limited in-text formatting, i.e. bold/italic font (not in headers, I mean in the text) etc., biggest problem of this is that you easily miss that during conversion.

• well-prepared tables, i.e. simple ones, or LaTeX-ready if complicated (taming complicated tables is sometimes a thing for the real masters, it takes up to cca 1 hour per 1 page of tables)

At the beginning or at the end, you have to add extra time if the person who does the conversion is supposed to choose the styles of the headers, captions, titles etc. This extra time is difficult to say. It's less than 1 hour if you don't want anything "fancy", it's many hours, if you want a unique brilliant style that thinks on every detail.

All the above is, moreover, true for someone experienced in LaTeX, who knows what to do, what not to do, how to quickly recognise and sort out compilation errors etc.

Answer 2

There are a lot of variables that go into this, and they depend mostly on the tools (i.e. editor, etc.) you use. The number of chapter, section and subsection headings will complicate things, but as long as you know what they are called and can search for them, it shouldn't be too complicated to enclose them in the appropriate macro. Most of the work will be mindless copy/pasting (unless you decide to use something like antiword and then you suddenly find yourself with a new, completely different can of worms in your hands).

You will have to retype all the math. I don't think there's a way around that.

Figures and tables are an entire different beast. Depending on their complexity, how different they are from each other and where their data is stored, you are looking at as little as 10 minutes to as much as several hours, or even days, of work for each one. This also assumes you are fairly proficient in LaTeX.

Getting the format just right will also depend on what the original formatting requirements are. However, your first problem still is to get a compilable draft of the document.

Check out this discussion on how to convert from Word to LaTeX: Converting MS Word .doc to LaTeX by command line. It doesn't give you a time estimate, but it should point you in the right direction.

Answer 3

A complex bibliography, many footnotes will certainly complicate matters. If it is just "plain text", most of the job can be done automatically in a few minutes, and the time will go into proofreading the result isn't messed up and doing cleanup. As Svend Mortensen says, mathematics will complicate things, in that it will have to be rewritten almost from scratch (the mathematics handling in Office et al is horrible). Tables will have to be redone, and images might require adjustments (fix fonts to agree with the text, for one).

Answer 4

As commenters and @SvendMortensen say, it depends.

That said, if it's mostly text you could consider saving the document as rtf and running an rtf2tex converter - perhaps http://www.ctan.org/pkg/rtf2tex or http://www.ctan.org/pkg/rtf2latex2e. (Google finds others.)

You would probably still have a fair bit of tinkering to do. That could be with some new macros, with tools that automate search and replace, and by hand.

Try one chapter first?

Answer 5

It depends---among other thing---on the contents of the book. The time consumption is usually greater if there is a lot of mathematics in the book.

Often tables can take some time to set up properly if you are not used to dealing with LaTeX.

There are other factors too, but I will stop here and go to bed.

Answer 6

You can convert the doc/rtf/odt file to LaTeX and see how it compiles (one option is Save As...LaTeX in LibreOffice.org using a plugin). You may like the results. If not, you can tweak them. You only have eight chapters, so those eight pages need to be formatted. If you have a good template, you could simply do a copy/paste, format the chapter pages, add a table of contents, front matter and you're good to go. Typesetting done either way could take less than a couple of hours.

A lot of the time involve has nothing to do with Word or LaTeX. You may think your Word file is finished, but my experience is that you keep tinkering with the text (not the typesetting) finding copyediting errors, etc. Copyediting a 160 page book is going to take more than one day, this has nothing to do with LaTeX. Also, it may be that you have a problem with the formatting that you have to research and this takes time. Scaling diagrams, for example. Don't confuse the time spent fixing LaTeX or manuscript problems with time spent tinkering with the manuscript, whatever format it's in.

Answer 7

Very little time ... say a day to typeset, a day to review and then a day to re-typeset ... that's all. LaTeX is a very efficient tool and if you are having all of your contents ready at your hand then it hardly takes a single seating to completely format a book of 200 pages. I just completed a book on LaTeX (100+ pages), may get published in April 2013.