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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

#71

Post by Rp8yXmdmr »

voidUpdate wrote: post #67

> "I would love if the XHTML and TeX were artifacts rather than code" What's an "artifact"? I don't come from a writing background, so it may be obvious to some people, but I only know that word in a historical-ish context, as something old and important, which doesn't seem to make sense in this context

Artifact in this context is whatever is produced by build process. That is common convention in CI/CD context. And the base definition for "artifact" is very wide: anything artificial, as in not natural but made by humans.

Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline

#73

Post by voidUpdate »

Rp8yXmdmr wrote: post #71
voidUpdate wrote: post #67

> "I would love if the XHTML and TeX were artifacts rather than code" What's an "artifact"? I don't come from a writing background, so it may be obvious to some people, but I only know that word in a historical-ish context, as something old and important, which doesn't seem to make sense in this context

Artifact in this context is whatever is produced by build process. That is common convention in CI/CD context. And the base definition for "artifact" is very wide: anything artificial, as in not natural but made by humans.

Aren't the xhtml and TeX already artifacts though? They are produced from a script that parses the ODT

Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline

#74

Post by Ametrin »

diamondap wrote: post #4

Kudos 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…

[dead]

Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline

#75

Post by dghf »

skydhash wrote: post #27
KPGv2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

I keep on meaning to try these out: https://www.schaffter.ca/mom/

Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline

#76

Post by dnlzro »

chrismorgan wrote: post #50
raincole wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

> It should obviously be the orphan.

But it isn’t obvious that a line cut off from its descendants should be a widow, so that mapping isn’t ideal either.

I propose “bereaved” — a parent cut off from its children.

Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline

#77

Post by ahknight »

theknarf wrote: post #69

You'll get pretty far if you start off with Obsidian + Markdown + a makefile with Pandoc. You can even combine Markdown and Latex files together with Pandoc. This gives you an easy workflow with all the power you need using Latex as an escape hatch. And Obsidian have enough plugins to do whatever you want (or swap it for any other Markdown or code editor of your choice).

This is where I'm at right now and it works rather well. I have a glue script that automates some shorthand in the Markdown into LaTeX for PDF and pre-set styles for DOCX and HTML exports. It works rather well, and being able to tweak my own LaTeX shell for the content is quite nice as well.

It's ePub that gets the weak treatment right now. Which just has me wondering if I can have my tool output the input files this standardebook toolkit wants (probably) and get a reasonable output from it.

Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline

#78

Post by ahknight »

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…

If you use Markdown, then it almost doesn't matter because your converted output won't have a line break until you insert a single newline.

Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline

#79

Post by ahknight »

dustin1114 wrote: post #60
huijzer wrote: post #22

Uhm why not Typst? I published my thesis and another book in it and it worked great. They are also working on HTML output which should make it easier to create EPUBs. Until then Pandoc should work I think

typst is great. I experimented with it, it I simply didn't have the fine-tuning and maturity LaTeX. For example, window/orphan control is a binary on/off, while LaTeX calculates by penalties at a much lower level. Pandoc is also great (I used it often for unrelated workflows), but it can't map custom styles from ODT files (not sure about Word).

The funny thing is that you can use both a style template and content template with the DOCX exporter of pandoc and _export_ custom styles. You just can't import them.

Works great on my MD -> DOCX/PDF/HTML workflows but not the inverse, alas.

Re: I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline

#80

Post by ahknight »

genewitch wrote: post #62

https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-ste... as linked in the article, looks like a nightmare. i was hyped that i could recommend something to author friends, but, i can hear it now, "Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!" oh well, they'll have to pay someone that understands all of that, because i don't.

It's fairly straightforward. Create the source files. Iterate the linter checks until it passes. Finalize.

I'd bet they just spell it out at each step so there's something to point to when they do those final reviews and reject it. "Now go look at step 385 and try again."

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