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Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book

rkrishnan.org

31–40 of 76 posts

Re: Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book

#31
post #7

Recently I've been playing with Prince [1] and I've found it to be very powerful with excellent support for paged media. Given that HTML, CSS, Javascript, SVG is used to build the document, it's also familiar to most people already. There doesn't seem to be any open source competitor to Prince though. [1]: http://www.princexml.com/

I'm happy to know about Prince, but US$3800 for a server license is beyond extravagant for any but large corporate users.

Re: Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book

#32
post #27
post #15

As a typesetting aficionado, I have tried most of the suggestions here (Prince, Troff, Lout, Docbook XML, Asciidoc, LaTeX, ConTeXt, .. except GUI typesetting tools.) TeX appears bad from a distance, mostly from hearsay, until you have to write an actual technical book of certain expected high production standards and you realize TeX gives you the best shot at doing so. There is a learning curve. It is an investment o…

Sadly I have to work in Windows at times. Context seems to not be the most supported Windows platform. (The link to the Windows simplified package is 404) There is a New Installer http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Windows_Installation_new which does not contain a working binary. The only way to find anything for windows leads to a tar file. I still think there is a better way to do typesetting in 2016 but all I have seen…

For LaTeX on Windows I enjoy http://miktex.org/.

Re: Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book

#33
post #15

As a typesetting aficionado, I have tried most of the suggestions here (Prince, Troff, Lout, Docbook XML, Asciidoc, LaTeX, ConTeXt, .. except GUI typesetting tools.) TeX appears bad from a distance, mostly from hearsay, until you have to write an actual technical book of certain expected high production standards and you realize TeX gives you the best shot at doing so. There is a learning curve. It is an investment o…

I like LaTeX for formatting small works. But would a publisher be willing to take LaTeX input when producing a book?

Re: Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book

#35
post #27
post #15

As a typesetting aficionado, I have tried most of the suggestions here (Prince, Troff, Lout, Docbook XML, Asciidoc, LaTeX, ConTeXt, .. except GUI typesetting tools.) TeX appears bad from a distance, mostly from hearsay, until you have to write an actual technical book of certain expected high production standards and you realize TeX gives you the best shot at doing so. There is a learning curve. It is an investment o…

Sadly I have to work in Windows at times. Context seems to not be the most supported Windows platform. (The link to the Windows simplified package is 404) There is a New Installer http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Windows_Installation_new which does not contain a working binary. The only way to find anything for windows leads to a tar file. I still think there is a better way to do typesetting in 2016 but all I have seen…

I thought ConText was using Lua for scripting things.

This suggests that:

http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Mark_IV

Re: Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book

#36
post #15

As a typesetting aficionado, I have tried most of the suggestions here (Prince, Troff, Lout, Docbook XML, Asciidoc, LaTeX, ConTeXt, .. except GUI typesetting tools.) TeX appears bad from a distance, mostly from hearsay, until you have to write an actual technical book of certain expected high production standards and you realize TeX gives you the best shot at doing so. There is a learning curve. It is an investment o…

I like LaTeX for formatting small works. But would a publisher be willing to take LaTeX input when producing a book?

They've been a pain in the ass about it IME, but you can convert it to markdown for editing, then PDF for pre-print.

Re: Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book

#37
For anyone missing the lede here: the book is typeset in troff. This is astonishing because troff is 40+ years old and AFAIK hasn't gotten significant development in ~10 years. If it ain't broke don't fix it. http://www.troff.org/history.html

Re: Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book

#38
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly I have to work in Windows at times. Context seems to not be the most supported Windows platform. (The link to the Windows simplified package is 404) There is a New Installer http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Windows_Installation_new which does not contain a working binary. The only way to find anything for windows leads to a tar file. I still think there is a better way to do typesetting in 2016 but all I have seen…

I thought ConText was using Lua for scripting things. This suggests that: http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Mark_IV

you use ConTeXt over the LuaTeX engine.

So it still requires Ruby and you can do Lua code.

Re: Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book

#39
post #7

Recently I've been playing with Prince [1] and I've found it to be very powerful with excellent support for paged media. Given that HTML, CSS, Javascript, SVG is used to build the document, it's also familiar to most people already. There doesn't seem to be any open source competitor to Prince though. [1]: http://www.princexml.com/

It also means your documents are locked to a proprietary standard that isn't that widely used (compared to say MS Word) and as such, may not be totally recoverable 10,20 or 30 years from now. You want to keep that in mind when you choose which typesetting system to use - for the record, I keep a digital diary that I intend should still exist 50 years from now. I use only markdown, and the occasional entry that mention really private stuff is ascii encrypted with GPG.

Re: Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book

#40
post #15

As a typesetting aficionado, I have tried most of the suggestions here (Prince, Troff, Lout, Docbook XML, Asciidoc, LaTeX, ConTeXt, .. except GUI typesetting tools.) TeX appears bad from a distance, mostly from hearsay, until you have to write an actual technical book of certain expected high production standards and you realize TeX gives you the best shot at doing so. There is a learning curve. It is an investment o…

Care to comment on the reasons for using ConTeXt versus LaTeX? I've been curious about ConTeXt for a while, but I fall back on LaTeX out of familiarity (and the need to use provided document classes.)

LaTeX's selling point is, it allows someone(publisher, conference committee, school, professor) to set what is acceptable typesetting and rest of us can focus on the content.

ConTeXt is excellent if you care about design -- visual, layout, use of non-traditional typeface families, non-traditional print medium, create magazines, glossies, etc.,.

Writing a new style, class etc., for LaTeX feels like it's for "experts only". On the other hand, extending and creating new styles etc., for ConTeXt is much more natural part of creating the document.

ConTeXt is also highly programmable and extensible using Lua, XML(think machine generated catalogue).

With Metapost (graphics language), you can create highly sophistical vector diagrams. I have found pgf/tikz to be highly opinionated and it take much more upfront learning compared to metapost.

ConTeXt is also more intuitive, IMHO.

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