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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
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no substitute for apprenticeship (by whatever name). Unfortunately, skills of this kind may be close to extinction. For someone like you just interested in getting better at layout design, I'd recommend something like 'The Elements of Typographic Style', by Bringhurst; this concentrates mostly on books, but much applies to other layouts. Of more general interest -- i.e., beyond layout design -- might be 'An E…
Thank you! I have been absorbing Bringhurst methodically the past year. I had not heard of Glaister, will be on the lookout. Good point about library and corporate sales. My main supply of materials from the 60s has been from estate sales -- not for instructional materials, but for well composed period pieces. Older letterfaces and color palettes are so evocative; seeing the label of a 70 year old oil can with so muc…
Have to say I'm finding the story of your efforts so far uplifting. Keep up the good work, and good luck.
Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline
#43Kudos to you for doing that. I've been publishing print and ebooks since 2015, and I can attest to the fact the Word to PDF X-1/a to epub/kindle pipeline is painful. Making minor edits after publication is also painful, as the author notes, and can be error prone if you fail to make identical changes to all formats. The problem was bad enough that I built by own markdown to HTML to PDF/X-1a processor using Python, We…
> ... markdown to HTML to PDF/X-1a processor using Python, WeasyPrint, and ghostscript.
I've been converting HTML to PDF by running WeasyPrint (latest version) with options I hoped were sufficient to satisfy the X-1a rules -- can it not quite do that? Is that why you need ghostscript?
Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
There's no substitute for apprenticeship (by whatever name). Unfortunately, skills of this kind may be close to extinction. For someone like you just interested in getting better at layout design, I'd recommend something like 'The Elements of Typographic Style', by Bringhurst; this concentrates mostly on books, but much applies to other layouts. Of more general interest -- i.e., beyond layout design -- might be 'An E…
“A Few Notes on Book Design” is also worth a read.
https://texdoc.org/serve/memdesign/0
If you have a decent TeX distribution installed you have a copy for long flights.
Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline
#45[dead]
Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline
#46[dead]
Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline
#47Kudos to you for doing that. I've been publishing print and ebooks since 2015, and I can attest to the fact the Word to PDF X-1/a to epub/kindle pipeline is painful. Making minor edits after publication is also painful, as the author notes, and can be error prone if you fail to make identical changes to all formats. The problem was bad enough that I built by own markdown to HTML to PDF/X-1a processor using Python, We…
> ... markdown to HTML to PDF/X-1a processor using Python, WeasyPrint, and ghostscript. I've been converting HTML to PDF by running WeasyPrint (latest version) with options I hoped were sufficient to satisfy the X-1a rules -- can it not quite do that? Is that why you need ghostscript?
I tried make my PDFs X-1a compliant with WeasyPrint, then ran them through Adobe's PDF/X validator and they kept failing. I was in a bit of a hurry and found a way to do it with ghostscript. I would like to remove ghostscript from the mix, so when I have some time, I may try again to do it all with WeasyPrint.
Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline
#48As 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…
I did't know what widows and orphans are so I looked it up.
> Widow (sometimes called orphan)
> Orphan (sometimes called widow)
> Runt (sometimes called widow or orphan)
Yeah I'm glad we programmers are not the only ones bad at naming things...
Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline
#49Hopefully some of the writers are reading this: I love buying and reading physical books. However, about half of the books (I read mostly programming books) have letters that are printed pixelated. This is infuriating to me. No one bothers to run a trial print and see what comes out? The root cause of this: PDF will look fine, but the text color is usually set slightly off black (why!!??). The eye couldn’t really see…
>> (but why would you have off-black text anyway?)
I had read a long time ago that when doing web design you should avoid pure white and pure black, especially when one is on top of the other. I presume it’s to avoid harshness or to keep the “white” from halo’ing into the black (made even worse on a CRT display).
That is probably the worst advice when doing a printed medium, though. Different medium targets sometimes have conflicting “best practices.”
Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I did't know what widows and orphans are so I looked it up. > Widow (sometimes called orphan) > Orphan (sometimes called widow) > Runt (sometimes called widow or orphan) Yeah I'm glad we programmers are not the only ones bad at naming things... [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans
I am firmly convinced that the customary mapping of widow/orphan is back to front. You’re really trying to convince me that the one that has been cut off from its antecedents is the widow? It should obviously be the orphan.
So, no wonder people confuse them, because the popular mapping is wrong.