3 ms·
There is a lot of nuance and complication to typesetting books that isn't apparent to an untrained observer, and markdown + css simply isn't sophisticated enoug
by giraffe_lady 3y ago
There is a lot of nuance and complication to typesetting books that isn't apparent to an untrained observer, and markdown + css simply isn't sophisticated enough to handle it. Even html/css + js is technically capable but far far behind the state of the art in digital typesetting.
This is also a very classic "well I could do it better" engineer trap so please don't assume that without some research. It's an ancient domain relative to what we're talking about here and has accumulated a lot of valuable insight & technique that should not be simply discarded because markdown is almost good enough for some things.
- gglitch 3y agoDo you have recommendations? (La)TeX, maybe, or *roff?
- giraffe_lady 3y agoI don't have any professional typesetting experience, just some adjacency from having done some work for a type foundry at one point, that gave me some insight into how much actually goes into it. Most professionals use expensive professional software for it. Latex or pollen or other pure markup solutions only work for smallish documents, or digital ones. Once you're going to print, esp in different formats, you need to care about page imposition, aligning with folios & signatures, widows & orphans etc. Just generally the physical reality of paper leaking into your abstraction of "the book" in ways markup alone can't accommodate.