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Darn, I was hoping to see the code that formatted the beautiful final typesetting. The author’s workflow ends with HTML, alas. However, I’m also kind of glad

Darn, I was hoping to see the code that formatted the beautiful final typesetting. The author’s workflow ends with HTML, alas. However, I’m also kind of glad to see that the typesetting was done by a real person earning a living as a craftsman designer. While I selfishly would love to have access to automated book-quality typesetting I’m also in favour of craftsfolk having a place in the economy!

jfk13 7y ago
Looks like it was done by an agency based in India, using a TeX-based system. But most likely with custom in-house macro packages etc rather than just off-the-shelf LaTeX or ConTeXt styles.
- mjd 7y ago
  The interior design and macro packages were done by a brilliant Morgan-Kaufmann employee named Julio Esperas. The actual typesetting was outsourced to a firm in Bangalore that didn't have much experience with TeX and that did a very bad job. I had to work hard to correct as many of their mistakes as possible.
  - dorfsmay 7y ago
    In what format did you write the source?
    - LukeShu 7y ago
      Per https://hop.perl.plover.com/book/ https://hop.perl.plover.com/book/ he used a modified version of the "POD" markup associated with Perl.
    - mjd 7y ago
      I implemented a simple markup language, “Mod”, that was similar to the “POD” language used to format the Perl man pages. There's a summary here: https://github.com/mjdominus/mod https://github.com/mjdominus/mod The main desideratum was that I should be able to use the same sources to generate TeX to send to the compositors, HTML for the web version, and a plain text version output. (In the end I sent the HTML version to the compositors instead.) Also I wanted inline tests, so that when the book said "function `foo` returns 7" I could have an inline test that would check that automatically. I added some features I needed that POD didn't have, like a code to generate an index entry. And I fixed some things I didn't like about POD. Markdown hadn't been invented yet or I probably would have modified that instead of POD. Pandoc hadn't been invented yet or I probably would have used it. But Mod didn't take long to make, and it worked well enough that it didn't get in the way while I wrote a book in it.

jfk13 7y ago

Looks like it was done by an agency based in India, using a TeX-based system. But most likely with custom in-house macro packages etc rather than just off-the-shelf LaTeX or ConTeXt styles.

mjd 7y ago
The interior design and macro packages were done by a brilliant Morgan-Kaufmann employee named Julio Esperas. The actual typesetting was outsourced to a firm in Bangalore that didn't have much experience with TeX and that did a very bad job. I had to work hard to correct as many of their mistakes as possible.
- dorfsmay 7y ago
  In what format did you write the source?
  - LukeShu 7y ago
    Per https://hop.perl.plover.com/book/ https://hop.perl.plover.com/book/ he used a modified version of the "POD" markup associated with Perl.
  - mjd 7y ago
    I implemented a simple markup language, “Mod”, that was similar to the “POD” language used to format the Perl man pages. There's a summary here: https://github.com/mjdominus/mod https://github.com/mjdominus/mod The main desideratum was that I should be able to use the same sources to generate TeX to send to the compositors, HTML for the web version, and a plain text version output. (In the end I sent the HTML version to the compositors instead.) Also I wanted inline tests, so that when the book said "function `foo` returns 7" I could have an inline test that would check that automatically. I added some features I needed that POD didn't have, like a code to generate an index entry. And I fixed some things I didn't like about POD. Markdown hadn't been invented yet or I probably would have modified that instead of POD. Pandoc hadn't been invented yet or I probably would have used it. But Mod didn't take long to make, and it worked well enough that it didn't get in the way while I wrote a book in it.