Disclaimer: I don't know the first thing about typesetting. But I do
know one or two things about Linux.
I would suggest taking a look at LyX, which makes LaTeX document
authoring quite a lot easier. Using LaTeX directly will certainly give
you a lot of control, and is capable of producing very attractive
output, although you may wonder whether it's worth the pain. You can
convert DVI (LaTeX's "native" output format) to PostScript fairly
easily, which ought to make your printers happy.
OpenOffice itself may be up to the task of formatting pages as you
wish, with a bit of work - I believe it can export to PDF.
I believe Douglas Clark used a LaTeX system on Windows to typeset his
last two self-published books, both of which came out very well I
thought.
Dominic
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