I self-published a programming book, here's my story • Hacker News Board

Re: I self-published a programming book, here's my story

#21

Post by arooaroo » Mon, Jan 28, 2013, 4:52 PM UTC

jpallen wrote: post #3

As soon as I read his opening piece I thought 'this guy needs to use LaTeX', so I'm glad that he did in the end. I've benefited a lot from the stories and comments here at HN, so I'd like to offer my help in getting you started with LaTeX if you'd like to do something similar. I'd say that the major of downside of LaTeX is that it's not very accessible. One of my goals at the moment is to improve that, and that's par…

If all this typesetting talk has ignited people's interest in LaTeX then I can recommend a handy beginner's guide: Getting to Grips with LaTeX (http://www.andy-roberts.net/writing/latex) I can recommend it because I wrote it ;)

Funnily enough I've been meaning to make my guide into a self-published book too...

Re: I self-published a programming book, here's my story

#22

Post by kalid » Mon, Jan 28, 2013, 5:42 PM UTC

tjic wrote: post #19

> They said "This is the worst type-setting I’ve ever seen"...This got me thinking, if the first reactions are not even constructive Uh, actually, I think that that's wonderfully constructive advice: if someone says that, then you immediately know that your graphic design is such a big problem that nothing else you're doing is even getting through. I'd LOVE to get advice that's that clear, pointed, and actionable!

Totally agree. "This is the worst book I've ever seen" is not constructive. Specifically calling out the type-setting is one of the best pieces of feedback he could have hoped to receive.

Re: I self-published a programming book, here's my story

#23

Post by jcurbo » Mon, Jan 28, 2013, 5:46 PM UTC

What about writing it in Markdown then doing conversion to LaTeX using pandoc? I'm working on a research paper this way and it is working out nicely. Pandoc allows you to include a LaTeX template that you can customize to your heart's content yet still keep separate from your content. (you can also do html and epub directly from pandoc, with templates, if you desire)

Re: I self-published a programming book, here's my story

#24

Post by ayi » Mon, Jan 28, 2013, 5:47 PM UTC

orangeduck wrote: post #18

ayi wrote: post #10

My only concern about all this Markdown, Latex etc. is "spell checking". I'm Turkish and written several books (jQuery, php, javascript) but all of them were written in Microsoft Word because only Word has the most comprehensive spell checking for Turkish. Can someone suggest me a good Latex editor with good spell-checking (other than English)?

Notepad++ also has a spell checker which is pretty decent and afaik supports other languages.

It supports spell checking with ASpell but it doesn't have Turkish pack.

Re: I self-published a programming book, here's my story

#25

Post by dobbsbob » Mon, Jan 28, 2013, 6:00 PM UTC

nostarchpress is pretty good. you can simply email them your idea and if they like it, will parter you with editors and designers to take care of all the typesetting/layout. this according to some friends of mine i'm not published by nostarch

sounds better than the rest of the publishers who want a full draft

i'm too obscure to be published, i have no alphabet soup credentials so i self publish. majority of sales were from my site which was linked in the ebooks i sold on kindle, warriorforums and smashwords

never heard of LaTeX I'll check it out, I write everything plain text in emacs and then pay somebody in Uzbek to slap it together using minamalist design

Re: I self-published a programming book, here's my story

#26

Post by groovy2shoes » Mon, Jan 28, 2013, 6:05 PM UTC

jcurbo wrote: post #23

What about writing it in Markdown then doing conversion to LaTeX using pandoc? I'm working on a research paper this way and it is working out nicely. Pandoc allows you to include a LaTeX template that you can customize to your heart's content yet still keep separate from your content. (you can also do html and epub directly from pandoc, with templates, if you desire)

I second this. I used to write pure LaTeX by hand all the time. I feel like Markdown lets me focus more on my content than my markup, and Pandoc's version of Markdown has some extensions that make it easy to take advantage of the LaTeX backend (including titles and LaTeX math). Pandoc is excellent and I've yet to encounter a use case where I feel like it'd be easier to switch back to writing LaTeX.

Re: I self-published a programming book, here's my story

#27

Post by Stwerp » Mon, Jan 28, 2013, 6:11 PM UTC

jcurbo wrote: post #23

What about writing it in Markdown then doing conversion to LaTeX using pandoc? I'm working on a research paper this way and it is working out nicely. Pandoc allows you to include a LaTeX template that you can customize to your heart's content yet still keep separate from your content. (you can also do html and epub directly from pandoc, with templates, if you desire)

I've been living in Emacs + Auctex for a while now, so my questions about markdown/pandoc: I have grown very accustomed to regex (and normal) searches on my bibtex/reference database and easily plugging in citations in my document. Is there support for this (reftex) in any of the markdown editors? I don't know if I've seen a good solution to this.

The other thing is preview-latex which inline-png's all equations, section titles and images in the emacs buffer. This is very valuable to me to easily see a figure without needing to tab between windows. I don't think markdown would support something like this, as far as I'm aware.

I like the idea of complete separation of content and appearance/layout, but Latex has many customizations (psfrag for image text replacement, tikz, programming custom macros) that I would be somewhat lost without. For instance, I start all my outlines in org-mode, and love having quick html, or tex->pdf output, but for the real nitty-gritty content, I _need_ my straight latex code.

Re: I self-published a programming book, here's my story

#28

Post by TylerE » Mon, Jan 28, 2013, 6:19 PM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #11

jpallen wrote: post #3

As soon as I read his opening piece I thought 'this guy needs to use LaTeX', so I'm glad that he did in the end. I've benefited a lot from the stories and comments here at HN, so I'd like to offer my help in getting you started with LaTeX if you'd like to do something similar. I'd say that the major of downside of LaTeX is that it's not very accessible. One of my goals at the moment is to improve that, and that's par…

The biggest accessibility problem I have with LaTeX for bookwriting is that the stylesheet language is very strange by modern standards. You can ignore it if you're writing academic papers with a provided stylesheet (or with one of the default ones), but you often will want to do some custom formatting if you're writing a book. I've heard ConTeXt might be an improvement, though.

Context is better for book type content, if you want to do things like sidebars, colors, etc. It's also a little more "do what I say" vs LaTeX's "do what you think is best", which generally produces good results, but can be infuriating when e.g. you really want a figure and certain text on the same page or something like that.

Re: I self-published a programming book, here's my story

#29

Post by fekberg » Mon, Jan 28, 2013, 6:54 PM UTC

tjic wrote: post #19

> They said "This is the worst type-setting I’ve ever seen"...This got me thinking, if the first reactions are not even constructive Uh, actually, I think that that's wonderfully constructive advice: if someone says that, then you immediately know that your graphic design is such a big problem that nothing else you're doing is even getting through. I'd LOVE to get advice that's that clear, pointed, and actionable!

You're right, at the time though it didn't feel very constructive to hear those words. There are much better ways that it could have been presented to me however the impact of a nicer way to say it might have changed the outcome of the book...

It all lead to something great and I am grateful for that.

Re: I self-published a programming book, here's my story

#30

Post by jcurbo » Mon, Jan 28, 2013, 7:50 PM UTC

Stwerp wrote: post #27

jcurbo wrote: post #23

What about writing it in Markdown then doing conversion to LaTeX using pandoc? I'm working on a research paper this way and it is working out nicely. Pandoc allows you to include a LaTeX template that you can customize to your heart's content yet still keep separate from your content. (you can also do html and epub directly from pandoc, with templates, if you desire)

I've been living in Emacs + Auctex for a while now, so my questions about markdown/pandoc: I have grown very accustomed to regex (and normal) searches on my bibtex/reference database and easily plugging in citations in my document. Is there support for this (reftex) in any of the markdown editors? I don't know if I've seen a good solution to this. The other thing is preview-latex which inline-png's all equations, sec…

Citations: Pandoc has its own format for citations that it translates to LaTeX etc as needed. Most Markdown editors I have seen or used don't have any support for pandoc's extended features. So while I am sure this could be possible with work on Emacs (or vim, or whatever) I'm not aware of anything that does what you do out of the box. Personally, I am writing in Byword (with some tweaks in macvim as necessary) and storing/looking up citations in BibDesk.

Same deal with preview-latex - you can include LaTeX directly in pandoc documents, but no editor I know of will do previews of it for you. I do think that is an awesome feature though.

Overall I think the audience for Markdown is people who don't want to get down in the weeds with, say, LaTeX and Emacs like you do. Thus, the feature set for Markdown-focused editors is still fairly simple. Pandoc is useful because it lets you add a layer of complexity on top of your Markdown as necessary (through templates) and get it into different formats easily. (The same can probably be said for other Markdown systems like MultiMarkdown but I like Pandoc) I have managed to set up my workflow to get Pandoc-flavored markdown into an apa6 LaTeX template without any significant issues, due to pandoc being fairly flexible, but it's not quite at WYSIWYG-style writing just yet.