3 ms·

The short answer is that they're print ready as-is. Eric Ries printed a Leanpub book of his first year's worth of blog posts (we sold them at the first Startup

by spatten 15y ago

The short answer is that they're print ready as-is. Eric Ries printed a Leanpub book of his first year's worth of blog posts (we sold them at the first Startup Lessons Learned conference). They looked pretty good. The slightly longer answer is that we are working on some features for a more print-ready PDF. Right now our PDFs are optimized for on-screen reading. Sone small changes such as gutters and page numbers that alternate sides will make a nicer looking print book.

jamesbritt 15y ago
The slightly longer answer is that we are working on some features for a more print-ready PDF. Right now our PDFs are optimized for on-screen reading. Sone small changes such as gutters and page numbers that alternate sides will make a nicer looking print book. So, right now, who or what handles kerning, tracking, and such to ensure that you don't get distracting "rivers" of white space, odd page/paragraph breaks, and the like when printed?
- alexchamberlain 15y ago
  Software can do this... (La)TeX has been doing it for years, and rarely gets it wrong.
- DanBC 15y ago
  How does that work on a device like Kindle where people can change page orientation; font size; line spacing; column sizing; from condensed to not condensed; and change from serif to sans serif? I notice lots of rivers on Kindle.
  - jamesbritt 15y ago
    spatten said that Leanpub output is currently "print ready as-is." My question was, when a Leanpub document is printed, what ensures that there aren't distracting bits of extra white space and other annoyances that often require a human eye and manual adjustment to avoid? If you're seeing rivers on a Kindle I'm guessing there'd be the same problem on paper.
- spatten 15y ago
  We use LaTeX to take care of this in our PDFs. It does a pretty good job. Yes, it won't be 100% as good as if you paid a typesetter to do it, but there is nothing obviously objectionable. For example, one of our books (leanpub.com/battingat10) was written by Chick Dubber, a retired typesetter. He noticed some bad hyphenation and we tweaked a few settings to make it look good. Other than that, he had no complaints. There are lots of book samples that you can get for free from Leanpub. Many are linked to here: http://leanpub.com/bestsellers http://leanpub.com/bestsellers. Take a look and see what you think.
  - jamesbritt 15y ago
    Sweet, thanks for this. edit: Took a look at Raganwald's combinator book sample. It has this bit of code: address = Person.find(...).tap { |p| logger.log "person #{p} found" }.addre\ ss That's absurd. Was this an editing choice by Reg, or is this something the software does?
    - spatten 15y ago
      This is a special case of a preformatted code block. For preformatted code blocks, there has to be an absolute line length -- otherwise the code just flows off the right side of the page, as <pre> blocks only do line-breaks when they are actually there. So, what we do is take all pre-formatted code blocks, wrap them if they go over a certain line length and send a warning to the author letting them know that we did this. This is a case where human intervention is required -- we need to show all of the text, but most of the time you'll want to edit where the line breaks manually. Most of the time automation is good enough, but we try to inform authors when there's something that needs their attention.
      - jamesbritt 15y ago
        This is a case where human intervention is required -- we need to show all of the text, but most of the time you'll want to edit where the line breaks manually. OK, so an author would know that there were things that should be manually inspected and changed if needed.
halostatue 15y ago
I have recently bought Reginald Braithwaite's Kestrels book and note that it was formatted for 8 1/2 x 11. Is this typical, or is it easy to get the page size set for 6 x 9?
- halostatue 15y ago
  I got an answer back from Scott: they support 8 1/2 x 11 and 6 x 9. This is good.

by spatten 15y ago

jamesbritt 15y ago

The slightly longer answer is that we are working on some features for a more print-ready PDF. Right now our PDFs are optimized for on-screen reading. Sone small changes such as gutters and page numbers that alternate sides will make a nicer looking print book. So, right now, who or what handles kerning, tracking, and such to ensure that you don't get distracting "rivers" of white space, odd page/paragraph breaks, and the like when printed?

alexchamberlain 15y ago
Software can do this... (La)TeX has been doing it for years, and rarely gets it wrong.
DanBC 15y ago
How does that work on a device like Kindle where people can change page orientation; font size; line spacing; column sizing; from condensed to not condensed; and change from serif to sans serif? I notice lots of rivers on Kindle.
- jamesbritt 15y ago
  spatten said that Leanpub output is currently "print ready as-is." My question was, when a Leanpub document is printed, what ensures that there aren't distracting bits of extra white space and other annoyances that often require a human eye and manual adjustment to avoid? If you're seeing rivers on a Kindle I'm guessing there'd be the same problem on paper.
spatten 15y ago
We use LaTeX to take care of this in our PDFs. It does a pretty good job. Yes, it won't be 100% as good as if you paid a typesetter to do it, but there is nothing obviously objectionable. For example, one of our books (leanpub.com/battingat10) was written by Chick Dubber, a retired typesetter. He noticed some bad hyphenation and we tweaked a few settings to make it look good. Other than that, he had no complaints. There are lots of book samples that you can get for free from Leanpub. Many are linked to here: http://leanpub.com/bestsellers http://leanpub.com/bestsellers. Take a look and see what you think.
- jamesbritt 15y ago
  Sweet, thanks for this. edit: Took a look at Raganwald's combinator book sample. It has this bit of code: address = Person.find(...).tap { |p| logger.log "person #{p} found" }.addre\ ss That's absurd. Was this an editing choice by Reg, or is this something the software does?
  - spatten 15y ago
    This is a special case of a preformatted code block. For preformatted code blocks, there has to be an absolute line length -- otherwise the code just flows off the right side of the page, as <pre> blocks only do line-breaks when they are actually there. So, what we do is take all pre-formatted code blocks, wrap them if they go over a certain line length and send a warning to the author letting them know that we did this. This is a case where human intervention is required -- we need to show all of the text, but most of the time you'll want to edit where the line breaks manually. Most of the time automation is good enough, but we try to inform authors when there's something that needs their attention.
    - jamesbritt 15y ago
      This is a case where human intervention is required -- we need to show all of the text, but most of the time you'll want to edit where the line breaks manually. OK, so an author would know that there were things that should be manually inspected and changed if needed.

halostatue 15y ago

I have recently bought Reginald Braithwaite's Kestrels book and note that it was formatted for 8 1/2 x 11. Is this typical, or is it easy to get the page size set for 6 x 9?

halostatue 15y ago
I got an answer back from Scott: they support 8 1/2 x 11 and 6 x 9. This is good.