best book publishing software for mac 2018

It generates an excellent, well-formatted table of contents without being asked. Vellum's interface, on the other hand, keeps its more limited selection of formatting choices always in easy reach. And Pages tucks some of its formatting options away in odd crannies and corners of the interface, hard to find even if you've used the program often before. If you want to add consistent formatting to every chapter of your book in Pages, you'll have to manually define, then apply, styles for different elements such as chapter headings or small-caps opening sentences throughout your entire manuscript.

You can manually create and format a table of contents that becomes interactive once your manuscript is exported into an ePUB. Images are a snap to include, both within your text and as its cover. Making an ePUB is only slightly more complex than exporting a file. Pages manages to surmount many, but hardly all, of the potential problems of creating an ebook. From a single manuscript, with a handful of clicks and no repetition, you can create multiple files tailor-made for the Kindle, iBooks, Nook, and Kobo stores, along with a standard ePUB. Vellum doesn't support fixed-layout ePUBs, but it offers a number of ebook-specific features Pages doesn't, including a greater variety of export formats. However, fixed-layout ePUBs don't convert to Kindle the same way print-based ePUBs do, with lots of formatting errors and missing text in my tests. These are often ideal for educational use – though iBooks Author offers even more extensive tools for that purpose. Pages also offers fixed-layout ePUB creation, for books with graphical layouts and lots of images.

What looked great on Pages' screen ballooned in size on my iPhone or iPad, sometimes spilling off the edge of the page. And I sometimes had trouble getting text in custom fonts to display correctly in Pages' ePUBs. If you want to sell your work, some stores, including iBooks, discourage you from submitting books with custom fonts. Unlike Vellum, Pages supports embedding custom fonts in the ePUB files you create, should you want to add some extra-cool typography. However, not all of them actually showed up in the ebooks I created border underlines for elements such as headings were notably AWOL. Pages, a word processor with ePUB features tacked on, offers a greater variety of text sizing, styling, and formatting options.

They can also be converted, usually with minimal difficulty, to Kindle-friendly. And both can export ePUB ebooks – which can be read on iOS, Nook, and Kobo e-readers. Both can incorporate cover art and tables of contents.

Both can edit and (to varying degrees) style imported text. Both programs can easily import text from elsewhere – Pages from a variety of formats, Vellum from any.

Best book publishing software for mac 2018