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

[rowyn]

Best typesetter! ♥

[alinsa]

Best writer! ♥

[mdlbear]

I love LaTeX and make -- use them for my song lyrics. Along with a generous helping of perl, which let me use the same source files for the PDF, HTML, and the liner notes on my CD.

[gconnor]

Wow, you should totally open-source your makefile and various recipes since that entire process is far from trivial. You could probably sell it too, but that would probably squeeze all the joy out of it.

[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

[level_head]

Happy Birthday, Alinsa!

Not to mention Happy Thanksgiving. I hope that you've got family/friends/comfort around you.

===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle