Success and Step Forward - with Pages

Question

I have been in the process of writing a book, and having done most of the preliminary writing in Nisus Writer (Classic) OS 9. Then when I made the switch to OS X about 14 months ago I decided to put it into MS Word 2004. Generally it went well. But I had about 100 pages of photos to insert at various places through the book (making 300+ pages). That made me nervous attempting that with Word.
About two months ago I decided to try Pages for the photo layout alone. After a while I got the hang of it, and completed almost all photos (I still have cropping and layout for 30 photos) this past week. Then as an after thought I opened a copy of the Word document (I always use a copy!) in Pages. It opened almost perfectly, headers, footers (no footnotes, endnotes or bibliography) came through fine, but the page breaks were slightly off, which for me is a minor issue.
So, now my next step is to put everything into Pages including the photos (probably break the file into chapter files for faster, easier work/editing). So a five year project is about to wrap up in the next month, and Pages has been the breakthrough I needed to make it this far. It was far more satisfying than buying InDesign or Quark and trying to learn one of those, then produce anything with it. And since this will be self-published I don't have to have it print-shop perfect for them in their format.
Maybe for many of you this seems rather minor. But for me struggling to find the right software to finish the project without losing the rest of my hair, this was a big deal, and a major step forward.

Answer 1

Hi Dennis,
I might be able to answer a few of your points. Having had two books published now I've got quite used to the wierdness of publishers and editors. With the editor I just send them a word document that they make their changes to in a differnet colour. Once all the editing is done and we're due to submit it to the publisher how it is submitted depends greatly on the publisher. My publisher accepts the manuscript in electronic format which is very rare. Most publishers still require that the manuscript be submitted in printed manuscript format. After the manuscript has been accepted by the publisher they make their changes and then we move into the PDF proof stage. Once everyone is happy it then goes to typesetting for print.
I've had no issue with pages for either method and it certainly handles the large document lengths without issue.
Chris