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Writing a book, still the same pain 15 years later

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Re: Writing a book, still the same pain 15 years later

#31

Post by bokumo »

wyldfire wrote: post #28
mikepurvis wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to use a workflow like this years ago working with Apress. Possibly (hopefully) things are better now, but at least at the time, all their tooling expected Word docs as the input, and you had to use a very specific stylesheet (including goofy stuff like magic text strings to insert images). There were also some manual transformation steps occurring on their end, because there was a cutover point where the Wo…

Are there publishers who are more accommodating of inputs like LaTeX/pandoc/markdown/etc? It'd be great to know that kind of thing when considering publishers.

I think No Starch Press accepts LaTeX markup. There is a nostarch package on CTAN. https://ctan.org/pkg/nostarch?lang=en

Re: Writing a book, still the same pain 15 years later

#32

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

umvi wrote: post #22
atom-morgan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can say the same. I self-published a 500+ page book last year and was so drained from the process I haven't even seriously thought about writing my second book. When your armchair fan is sitting back criticizing George Martin for not finishing his books, I empathize with him. I totally get it.

I allow myself to criticize Patrick Rothfuss though. The absolute arrogance he displayed after publishing the first book of the series was astounding. He claimed the series was "already finished" and that each of the other 2 books would be released a year apart, simple as that. He wasn't like other authors, he assured us. Here we are, 10 years later with Rothfuss literally doing everything except finishing the series…

I hate all the criticism Rothfuss gets. He's had a version done for ages, but in his words it was “a book you would not have liked, because it was just discernibly bad.” He's spoken at length about the challenges and I find it hard to hold it against him. I'm sad Doors of Stone isn't out, sure, but he doesn't deserve any criticism.

Re: Writing a book, still the same pain 15 years later

#33

Post by neffy »

app4soft wrote: post #29
acangiano wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a side note, don't think writing a second edition makes the process any easier. I recently finished the second edition of my book on technical blogging and I'm left with the distinct feeling of having "changed little" while objectively having spent more time writing this than the first edition. Still, in the end, you get to hold your baby. As Winston Churchill said, "Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with i…

> As a side note, don't think writing a second edition makes the process any easier. Why? Just add "dot" on last page -- and second edition of your book is ready!

No, no, no. You have to move the chapters around, renumber the sections, change the order of the questions at the back, and introduce a couple of new typos.

Otherwise how are you going to force the students to buy the new edition?

Re: Writing a book, still the same pain 15 years later

#35

Post by cosmodisk »

mikepurvis wrote: post #14
umvi wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I myself write books in Markdown. Each chapter has a markdown file, the book is version controlled with Git, there is a "build script" that does a "build" (in this case it's a shell script that concatenates the markdown files and runs them through pandoc and calibre CLIs to generate eBooks and PDFs). When I send to my editor I just tell her to modify the files as she sees fit. When I get them back I put the new files…

I wanted to use a workflow like this years ago working with Apress. Possibly (hopefully) things are better now, but at least at the time, all their tooling expected Word docs as the input, and you had to use a very specific stylesheet (including goofy stuff like magic text strings to insert images). There were also some manual transformation steps occurring on their end, because there was a cutover point where the Wo…

The content of their books is often OK, however low-res images,pixelated tables and some random font and its size makes those books look funny..

Re: Writing a book, still the same pain 15 years later

#37

Post by hypocrazybr »

umvi wrote: post #10
carapace wrote: post #8

(Aw, I was hoping this would be about publishing a book with LaTeX...)

I myself write books in Markdown. Each chapter has a markdown file, the book is version controlled with Git, there is a "build script" that does a "build" (in this case it's a shell script that concatenates the markdown files and runs them through pandoc and calibre CLIs to generate eBooks and PDFs). When I send to my editor I just tell her to modify the files as she sees fit. When I get them back I put the new files…

Would you mind sharing this script? I am moving all my notes to markdown and I would like to setup something like that

Re: Writing a book, still the same pain 15 years later

#38

Post by boazbarak »

umvi wrote: post #10
carapace wrote: post #8

(Aw, I was hoping this would be about publishing a book with LaTeX...)

I myself write books in Markdown. Each chapter has a markdown file, the book is version controlled with Git, there is a "build script" that does a "build" (in this case it's a shell script that concatenates the markdown files and runs them through pandoc and calibre CLIs to generate eBooks and PDFs). When I send to my editor I just tell her to modify the files as she sees fit. When I get them back I put the new files…

I am using the same setup though with a lot of customization of pandoc

https://github.com/boazbk/tcs

Re: Writing a book, still the same pain 15 years later

#39

Post by carapace »

umvi wrote: post #10
carapace wrote: post #8

(Aw, I was hoping this would be about publishing a book with LaTeX...)

I myself write books in Markdown. Each chapter has a markdown file, the book is version controlled with Git, there is a "build script" that does a "build" (in this case it's a shell script that concatenates the markdown files and runs them through pandoc and calibre CLIs to generate eBooks and PDFs). When I send to my editor I just tell her to modify the files as she sees fit. When I get them back I put the new files…

Oh cool! I'm getting reasonable results using Pandoc->LaTeX->PDF with mostly markdown and bits of raw LaTeX as the source.

I pass `-V documentclass:scrbook` to pandoc and then I can use e.g. '\frontmatter' and '\mainmatter' in the MD source.

As I say, I'm getting reasonable results, but it's one of those "I can't be the first person to do this" situations. Got any tips or links to share?

Re: Writing a book, still the same pain 15 years later

#40

Post by namarie »

hypocrazybr wrote: post #37
umvi wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I myself write books in Markdown. Each chapter has a markdown file, the book is version controlled with Git, there is a "build script" that does a "build" (in this case it's a shell script that concatenates the markdown files and runs them through pandoc and calibre CLIs to generate eBooks and PDFs). When I send to my editor I just tell her to modify the files as she sees fit. When I get them back I put the new files…

Would you mind sharing this script? I am moving all my notes to markdown and I would like to setup something like that

Seconding this, for the same reasons really.
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