Which is better to use to write a book? Writer Document or Master Document?
Apart from the size of your book, it depends on how comfortable you are with Writer and especially master documents. Master documents can be a pain to work with when you aren’t comfortable with them.
In the past, master documents were advised for large documents with hundreds of pages, largely because of computer memory and speed issues.
Nowadays, you’d only need them if your book is loaded with graphics and/or other embedded objects. Or if you have a lot of documents that you want to publish in different formats. You can then make a set of master documents in which you define the styles with the formatting that you want for each publication and insert the documents that you want to include, then the settings like font and so on in the sub documents will be overridden by the settings in the styles with the same name in the master documents.
In short: use a single document unless you have plans for something really big.
Thanks very much!
In addition to @anon87010807’s answer, Work with styles and avoid direct formatting.
If you’re familiar with Word, be aware that Writer has pushed the style concept far beyond what is available in the competition.
All office suites offer paragraph styles. Writer gives you more:
- character styles, to format differently words inside a paragraph,
- page styles, to define geometry and other attributes of groups of pages,
- list styles, to define the appearance of numbering or bullets for lists items – is in fact an additional group of attributes for paragraph styles, will not work alone,
- frame styles, to define the position and properties of “inserts” (pictures or text) – the most difficult category to tame.
Styles allow you to separate contents from appearance. With a consistent set of styles, after-writing tuning of presentation is a pleasure. You can dramatically change the look of your book in a matter of seconds without the need to ever look at the text itself (because you have no direct formatting). This assumes you have thoroughly marked up your text with styles.
Styles don’t describe appearance (bold, italics, …) but significance, the importance you, as an author, give to your text or portions of it. Therefore, don’t name your styles “bold”, “yellow italics” but Strong Emphasis, Spanish. When you change your strong emphasis from bold to red, the name remains valid (what would mean a “bold” when it becomes normal weight+red?).
If you intend to write several similar looking books, the best thing you can do is to store your style collection in a template and base all your documents on this template (and this is a useful advice even when you work with a master+sub-documents to avoid being surprised by some unwanted side-effects). When you tune the styles in your template, your documents are automatically updated when you open them.
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It all depends on the size (i.e. the number of pages).
`’>50-100 pages a master document would be advisable.
Then the individual chapters should each result in a sub-document.
See: Master documents in Writer
See also: English documentation
I hope that can help.
PS: Another hint.
If you want to insert images, make sure that you reduce the size of the images before. For this you can use, for example, a free graphics program such as GIMP.