I made a thingy!

[alinsa]

Just to be a little different, here's a post that doesn't actually involve depression. I know, whoah, right? Anyhow.

So, I made a book! No, I didn't write a book (as that would require actual creativity, of which I have exactly none), but I did do all the work required to get rowyn's completed manuscript actually available -- all the typesetting work

Comments

[alinsa]

Well, the makefile itself is really really basic stuff, open sourcing it doesn't really gain anyone anything. The various other glue (mostly shell scripts and perl bits) might be somewhat more useful, but... they're kind of a mess, tossed together as new needs arose. I wasn't actually expecting to need a lot of glue, but things didn't turn out that way. :(

I may try to go through and clean it up if I continue doing typesetting with LaTeX, and if I do I'll probably release it.

I'm pondering switching to InDesign, though, after having fought with LaTeX perhaps one too many times -- it's great if you want something relatively straightforward, but the moment you want to go off the beaten path, it can get... fun. Plus the font handling is maddening (it's less maddening if you can use LuaLaTeX, but the kerning in LuaLaTeX has issues, so I use pdfLaTeX, which doesn't support fontspec).

I love LaTeX beyond that, though. It's awesome how everything is completely algorithmic and pretty much forces you to use semantic markup... I love how it uses fricking Dijkstra's algorithm for layout (not only does it make the internet go, it also makes your books!)... and I really, really love that I can use version control in a meaningful way with it -- InDesign just gives you a binary blob, which makes trying to do any meaningful kind of version control basically impossible. And to be honest, that's a huge loss in my book.

I should really at least play with InDesign, though. It's pretty powerful and I think it might be possible to do things like "supply the input via a linked external file that you can version control," which might be a reasonable halfway point. Not sure. One of these days I'll poke at it. In my copious free time.