Well, I gave up the beauty of a multi-colored book using OpenOffice.org when it ate most of my EFL book. I had to use pdftotext to recover what I had and decided to put it all in Latex, since I had to reformat the book, anyway.

The positive step from that process is that I have been able to break the chapters down into individual files, then include them in my book with a simple line. The fact that chapters are separated files makes creating small booklets as easy as creating a book template and importing the chapter I want ot make the booklet form.

As a result, I've managed to publish my chapter on verb tenses and one on an introduction to Ubuntu. More should follow quickly and the process makes me feel like I accomplish something, which is a feeling I haven't had in a while.

Posted on Monday 16 of October, 2006 [14:34:57 UTC]

Well, I've been working overtime for over a year now, and it has slowed my writing down quite a bit. I intended to have my first book about using Ubuntu in small schools ready by the June release date, but it didn't happen: It's not even close yet.
It won't be finished for at least a couple of months now because I have a new foreign teacher to train. The positive aspect of having someone to train is that I have incentive to work on material for my other book about teaching English in Asia.
Since my SO is out of town this week, I plan to get a lot done on that front. Today I worked on finalizing my covers. I know that sounds premature (and it probably is), but having the covers staring at me motivated me to finish the writing instead of surfing Slashdot.

Posted on Sunday 20 of August, 2006 [05:45:41 UTC]