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You can do it that way, but using something that's made for the job makes life a lot easier. Between Scrivener for writing and Vellum for compiling to ebook for
by weeksie 10y ago
You can do it that way, but using something that's made for the job makes life a lot easier. Between Scrivener for writing and Vellum for compiling to ebook formats there's no reason to spend your time futzing around. If you want to format for print, either pay someone or learn InDesign because nice print layout is tougher than it appears.
Then again, a lot of the self-pub strategy these days is specifically geared around getting as much out as quickly as possible, so that's not necessarily an invalid approach.
In any case, I prefer to spend most of my time writing rather than screwing about with tooling.
- nils-m-holm 10y agoI use TROFF and friends for layout and Ghostscript for generating PDF. No screwing around with a stupid GUI. :) Once you have a collection of macros set up, it's a natural process and allows you to focus on writing entirely. YMMV, of course.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoDepending on what you're doing, LaTeX may be a better option. But if troff works for you, I'm not complaining.
- technofiend 10y agoI always thought TeX and friends had much prettier output than roff-family output and my professors always appreciated a TeX formatted paper. But for rapid documentation writing I found roff perfectly acceptable. It worked for Bell Labs, so why not? In fact for a while I actually published my resume in man format after slightly tweaking the an macros. Very few people got the joke and most just asked if I could e-mail a copy in Word format. If a sysadmin / engineer / devops dude showed up today at my door with his resume in -man format I'd think it was cool. The fact that Scrivener is now available on the iPad and Literature and Latte abandoned Linux makes an iPad Pro a tempting platform. But frankly there's nothing wrong with using a unix distribution on a Chromebook or droplet via ssh and roff to author a book from start to finish. And it would be far cheaper than an iPad Pro.
- erebrus 10y agoWell...tbh this seems far more just like a cheap way of promoting the novel than a way to actually provide useful information
- keithpeter 10y agoThe OA specified the software used and the way that the tools were chained together, and he mentioned the somewhat kludgy workround for getting the chapter headings vertically centred on the page. I also found his other page linked from the OA about the actual writing process itself of interest. Specifically the way he 'reverse engineered' the plots of various popular novels by deciding on some common headings/categories and summarising each of the novels under those headings in a spreadsheet. What 'useful information' do you find to be missing?
- NoGravitas 10y agoI agree, I found both articles very interesting in terms of both writing workflow and self-publishing workflow.
- jnbiche 10y ago> learn InDesign Ahem, or learn the open-source Tex/Latex, from which InDesign took inspiration. If you can format a beautiful scientific/mathematical textbook for print using Tex, you can format anything. And Pandoc is a great adjunct. But yes, it's not for people who wish to avoid screwing around with tooling. It's for perfectionists who want absolute control over layout/notation.
- weeksie 10y agoWriting a novel in LaTeX is not the best approach if you're looking to write a lot of text and don't have to worry about notation. But Neil Stephenson famously wrote Cryptonomicon in Emacs and LaTeX, so hey, it works for some people. Edited to add that InDesign is much easier for back matter, front matter, laying out images, covers, etc. . . . And that's coming from someone who LOVES LaTeX. I set my old software company with some sweet templates and all of our proposals were typeset in LaTeX. It was awesome. But if you're writing a novel for print I really wouldn't recommend it.
- perlgeek 10y agoI agree that writing large volumes of text in LaTeX is cumbersome, and the same goes for text that includes many code samples. \begin{verbatim}...\end{verbatim} is just too verbose, and \verb|...| for inline code is also too verbose to my taste. So right now I'm writing my book in Markdown, and put it on leanpub for now (https://leanpub.com/deploy https://leanpub.com/deploy). For print, I'll either figure out a way to get a PDF formatted as I want it from leanpub, or use pandoc to create the markdown to LaTeX, and then write a custom template with all the customization. But this is something that I won't worry too much about until the manuscript is really finished.
- tjl 10y agoFor code samples I prefer to have them in separate files and include them so it's just one command that imports them and formats them. I wrote both my Master's and Ph.D. theses in LaTeX and found it much better than the alternatives. With Markdown I'd be resorting to falling back on LaTeX anyway and many of the additional Markdown features weren't available when I wrote them. I had a predefined document class for my Master's but the university changed the guidelines by the time of my Ph.D. so I used the Memoir document class and that had a lot of flexibility and I didn't have to include many other packages to format things. I basically set up the format once at the beginning, checked against the guidelines once at the end and that was it.
- sdoering 10y agoWhy so condescending? Reading your comment, after reading both of the author's posts on his methodology, I take that his approach might not be everybody's, but I took a lot more from his writing, then from your writing. You tell the author, not explicitly but non the less, that his method sucks and he is an idiot for not using "the right" (TM) tools. Using your method is ok - for you. Using his method is ok - for him. His is not more right or less right. Both of you got your work done and your book(s) published. > no reason to spend your time futzing around Well for some it is also the process that counts. And the ability to get stuff done without proprietary software. On a final note: Maybe I just misread your tone (at least, it's the internet) - maybe you weren't so a stuck up. Or didn't mean to be.
- weeksie 10y agoWell I was and I wasn't. I certainly don't begrudge a person for getting really involved with their tools. Depends on what your goals are. If it's productivity and a nice finished product then the tools he was using are likely not the best for the job, even if they are fun. No way to know for sure, but if I was handing out advice I would absolutely NOT suggest people use the tooling he used, even for developers.
- ggambetta 10y agoI'm doing this whole thing for pleasure, and for me f*cking around with the tooling was just as fun as writing the novel :D
- weeksie 10y agoHa! Then more power to you :) My point with this was from a workaday aspect. I both understand and respect getting nerdy about the tooling. And congrats, the first novel is the hardest.
- rekado 10y ago> InDesign A free software alternative(?) is Scribus. It doesn't nearly have as many features as InDesign but it is one of the few free software implementations of a desktop publishing programme.