Core Java 13th Edition Finally At the Printer
Most books—95%, in the estimate of my editor at Pearson—are written in Word and typeset with InDesign. Clearly, that workflow works for many authors.
Core Java is a big book, almost 2,000 pages in two volumes. It gets updated frequently. It is full of fiddly formatting. In the first four editions, my coauthor Gary Cornell and myself used Word. It did not work well for us.
Once the Word document has been turned into whatever is used for typesetting (these days, InDesign), last-minute changes are applied there, and they need to be manually backported to the Word document. That does not always happen correctly, and the next edition Word files start out with errors and inconsistencies.
Also, conversion from Word to another format is never perfect. Someone invariably fixes up something by hand, and nasty errors creep in.
The next four editions were written in FrameMaker, a desktop publishing package. This worked pretty well. The authors, copyeditors, and typesetters edited the same documents. The FrameMaker files were the repository of truth. Unfortunately, by 2010, it was hard to find copyeditors with FrameMaker expertise.
