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I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline

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Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline

#21

Post by PxldLtd »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #19
Exoristos wrote: post #7

As someone who worked for years in commercial print, before most manufacturing moved overseas, I recall the workflows the article discusses as being more automate-able than the author seems to understand. For example, "Making the slightest change became a chore. [1.] Update the 'master' DOCX. [2.] Update the InDesign file ..." --the appropriate way to use an external document as master in InDesign is to use the Place…

The place command does not autoupdate. At least not in the most recent version. Text is either embedded, in which case it's baked in, or linked, in which case you have to manually tell ID to update the link to reload the text. But InDesign's EPUB output is horrifically terrible, especially if you're trying to use custom fonts/graphics for page headings. (Basically - no.) And the CSS is... really not great. The best f…

> The rest was glue

Oh how often I keep saying that these days... "All the parts are there! Why hasn't anyone piped this into that?"

Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline

#24

Post by Exoristos »

raddan wrote: post #16
Exoristos wrote: post #7

As someone who worked for years in commercial print, before most manufacturing moved overseas, I recall the workflows the article discusses as being more automate-able than the author seems to understand. For example, "Making the slightest change became a chore. [1.] Update the 'master' DOCX. [2.] Update the InDesign file ..." --the appropriate way to use an external document as master in InDesign is to use the Place…

> Overall, as a technical writeup I enjoyed the article; however, I would caution that the author seems to approach publishing from an amateur perspective. I also worked at a publishing company (for ~6 years) in the early 2000s. While you are right that the pros have some tricks to make the process easier, the fact remains that the process is not easy at all. Unlike in academic publishing, where nothing stands betwee…

Maybe we worked at the same firm. You never know.

Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline

#25

Post by [deleted] »

KPGv2 wrote: post #11
kyboren wrote: post #6

AKA what CS PhD students have been doing ~forever. I guess this is like medical researchers "discovering" basic calculus or an office worker discovering that SFTP, sshfs, and git work fine and they don't need Dropbox after all. What's common knowledge in one field can apparently still be alien to people outside the field, even in the age of LLMs. Just wait until the author finds out about Overleaf...

> what CS PhD students have been doing ~forever. Or what every researcher has been doing for literally decades (except with other versioning systems, but still typesetting without Word or Adobe). No need for techbros to pat themselves on the back as innovators. I typeset my novels in LaTeX and use GIT. I even just clone a base repo whenever I'm going to release another.

[deleted]

Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline

#26

Post by skydhash »

BrenBarn wrote: post #12
helterskelter wrote: post #5

My only problem using git and a text editor is deciding whether I want hard or soft wraps. Vim handles hard wraps better IMO and you can change the git diff engine to something like difft, which makes it much more bearable than the default for hard wrap prose. But softwrap definitely has its advantages: no hard line breaks makes copying the text into other mediums easier, git diffs show only which paragraphs you edit…

The annoyances of using "soft wraps" with various kinds of tools is one of the maddening irritations of our software landscape. Inserting non-semantic newlines in content just to make things fit the screen is insane.

I think most authoring formats require a blank line to mark a paragraph. In emacs and in vim. You can easily reflow such block (and on unix there’s the fmt command).

Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline

#27

Post by skydhash »

KPGv2 wrote: post #11
kyboren wrote: post #6

AKA what CS PhD students have been doing ~forever. I guess this is like medical researchers "discovering" basic calculus or an office worker discovering that SFTP, sshfs, and git work fine and they don't need Dropbox after all. What's common knowledge in one field can apparently still be alien to people outside the field, even in the age of LLMs. Just wait until the author finds out about Overleaf...

> what CS PhD students have been doing ~forever. Or what every researcher has been doing for literally decades (except with other versioning systems, but still typesetting without Word or Adobe). No need for techbros to pat themselves on the back as innovators. I typeset my novels in LaTeX and use GIT. I even just clone a base repo whenever I'm going to release another.

I don’t have anything to publish, but one of these days, I’d like to try the troff suite (with eqn, pic, and tbl).

Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline

#29

Post by elevation »

raddan wrote: post #16
Exoristos wrote: post #7

As someone who worked for years in commercial print, before most manufacturing moved overseas, I recall the workflows the article discusses as being more automate-able than the author seems to understand. For example, "Making the slightest change became a chore. [1.] Update the 'master' DOCX. [2.] Update the InDesign file ..." --the appropriate way to use an external document as master in InDesign is to use the Place…

> Overall, as a technical writeup I enjoyed the article; however, I would caution that the author seems to approach publishing from an amateur perspective. I also worked at a publishing company (for ~6 years) in the early 2000s. While you are right that the pros have some tricks to make the process easier, the fact remains that the process is not easy at all. Unlike in academic publishing, where nothing stands betwee…

> Once you know what all the people in a top publishing company do, the difference between an amateur publication and a professional one becomes immediately apparent.

Any advise for developing this sense?

I will never work in a top publishing company but I have been able to approximate good design by first studying the fundamentals, then reproducing the layouts I see in popular media. I can make text into a beautiful book, and I see poor design choices in the corporate communication billion dollar companies.

But it feels like there’s a lot more I don’t know, and you never know what you don’t know, and it makes me wish I could absorb more from working under an expert.

Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline

#30

Post by Barbing »

PxldLtd wrote: post #21
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The place command does not autoupdate. At least not in the most recent version. Text is either embedded, in which case it's baked in, or linked, in which case you have to manually tell ID to update the link to reload the text. But InDesign's EPUB output is horrifically terrible, especially if you're trying to use custom fonts/graphics for page headings. (Basically - no.) And the CSS is... really not great. The best f…

> The rest was glue Oh how often I keep saying that these days... "All the parts are there! Why hasn't anyone piped this into that?"

Then I check 30 to 90 days later and sure enough, at least one person has done it.
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