Hello,
Please help me find the best-of-best LaTeX tutorials, how-tos, and packages related to every aspect of book publishing.
I’m currently working with Karl Berry and others to develop a website devoted to LaTeX application in book publishing—fiction, nonfiction, technical, and academic. We’re hoping to launch by the end of the year. Domain: texlibro.net.
High among our goals is to encourage self-publishers to adopt LaTeX into their publishing workflows. This is a challenging task since many self-publishers know little about LaTeX and are devoted to their word processors. But we won’t shy away from content of interest to LaTeX consultants and established publishers.
We’re striving to publish both links and original content with topics ranging across the full spectrum—how to get started with LaTeX; cover and interior design; formatting front matter and back matter; everything to do with publishing images, diagrams, and tables; efficient workflow; LaTex applications in book marketing, etc.
We’re most interested in immediate how-to application; less so in history and inside-baseball technology.
What can you recommend? What would you like to contribute?
All the best,
Lloyd R. Prentice
General ⇒ Book publishing tutorials
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Stefan Kottwitz
- Site Admin
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- Joined: Mon Mar 10, 2008 9:44 pm
Book publishing tutorials
Hi Lloyd,
welcome to the forum!
That sounds like a great project. Did you write "Build It With Nitrogen: The Fast-Off-the-Block Erlang Web Framework"? That's clearly LaTeX. Also, "Freein' Pancho" looks like LaTeX.
I wrote some books about LaTeX, but not within LaTeX (the publisher insists on Word-Indesign-Workflow), so I could contribute some experience with writing and publishing, just not technically with LaTeX, but having LaTeX in mind to compare both worlds.
You can reach me here and by email to stefan@latex.org .
Stefan
welcome to the forum!
That sounds like a great project. Did you write "Build It With Nitrogen: The Fast-Off-the-Block Erlang Web Framework"? That's clearly LaTeX. Also, "Freein' Pancho" looks like LaTeX.
I wrote some books about LaTeX, but not within LaTeX (the publisher insists on Word-Indesign-Workflow), so I could contribute some experience with writing and publishing, just not technically with LaTeX, but having LaTeX in mind to compare both worlds.
You can reach me here and by email to stefan@latex.org .
Stefan
LaTeX.org admin
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lrPrentice
- Posts: 7
- Joined: Mon Feb 26, 2018 9:05 pm
Book publishing tutorials
Hi Stefan,
Guilty on all three counts. Hope you enjoyed them.
All three books were composed in LyX. The novels came out okay, but Built It code listings were an eyesore. So, LaTeX consultant Kathyrn Hargreaves transferred the source to a LaTeX editor and cleaned up the code boxes. I was determined at that point to learn LaTeX.
My limited experience with LaTeX to date has convinced me, that while LaTeX is the best tool for self-publishing trade-quality books, LaTeX text markup imposes too much cognitive drag on creative composition. As a self-publisher, I highly value workflow efficiency throughout the publishing cycle.
For this reason, I was delighted to find Vit Novotńy’ LaTeX markdown package—so much so that my current work-in-progress is called Publish Beautiful Books with Markdown: the Fast Track to LaTeX. Beautiful is entirely composed in markdown. But I’m not yet totally satisfied. I’d love to see a bit of evolution or a fork of the markdown package that addresses a few of the edge cases I’ve encountered while writing Beautiful.
All the best,
Lloyd
Guilty on all three counts. Hope you enjoyed them.
All three books were composed in LyX. The novels came out okay, but Built It code listings were an eyesore. So, LaTeX consultant Kathyrn Hargreaves transferred the source to a LaTeX editor and cleaned up the code boxes. I was determined at that point to learn LaTeX.
My limited experience with LaTeX to date has convinced me, that while LaTeX is the best tool for self-publishing trade-quality books, LaTeX text markup imposes too much cognitive drag on creative composition. As a self-publisher, I highly value workflow efficiency throughout the publishing cycle.
For this reason, I was delighted to find Vit Novotńy’ LaTeX markdown package—so much so that my current work-in-progress is called Publish Beautiful Books with Markdown: the Fast Track to LaTeX. Beautiful is entirely composed in markdown. But I’m not yet totally satisfied. I’d love to see a bit of evolution or a fork of the markdown package that addresses a few of the edge cases I’ve encountered while writing Beautiful.
All the best,
Lloyd