[tug-consult] Toward a TeX Live book publishing scheme and website

[Lloyd R. Prentice]

Dear TeX consultant,

Help us reach out to more than 1.6 million self-publishers in need of your professional guidance.

TUGboat editor Karl Berry and Marc Worrell, lead developer of the Zotonic CMS, and I are working to develop a TeX Live package scheme curated for self-publishers and a website to make it as easy as possible for self-publishers to style and typeset their books with LaTeX.

Karl suggests that this list is the best place to get expert help in developing a list of must-have LaTeX packages for serious self-publishers and to identify best-of-the-best LaTeX tutorials and resources.

I’ve listed below a first cut of candidate book styling packages to include in the scheme. No doubt there are many more dependencies and utility packages that warrant inclusion. 

Please help us flesh out the list with the can’t-do-without book styling packages in your toolkit.

Naive selection criteria: Packages that are as easy as possible for self-publishers to understand and use. E.g., Given existing documentation, can a TeX-naive self-publisher use this package to style a book—fiction, nonfiction, technical, academic?  

That’s quite subjective. So we much need your professional experience to identify any and all packages that deserve inclusion. And if documentation is a problem, perhaps you can help us with tat.

We also invite your thoughts and suggestions re content and presentation of the website. Submission of how-tos and tutorials would be much welcome—an excellent vehicle to promote your consulting practice.

Our hope is that the TeX Live-based book publishing scheme plus clear and simple installation instructions will make it easier and faster to install TeX Live while reducing disk footprint. We further hope that tutorials and resource links in the website will make LaTeX a more attractive typesetting option for self-publishers. 

We will, of course, include consultants listings in the resource section.

Bowkers tells us that 1,677,781 ISBNs were assigned to self-published titles in 2018. That’s up 461,438 ISBNs in 2013. And that’s in the U.S. alone. Yes, a large percentage of these books were ebooks. But still…

https://www.bowker.com/siteassets/files/pdf-files/bowker-selfpublishing-report-2019.pdf

How many of these books were typeset with LaTeX? Fair guess, very few. Why? Safe bet— too little understanding of the benefits of LaTeX and too few noobie how-tos and tutorials explicitly written to help self-publishers publish better books.

Our hope is that we can bring new blood and enthusiasm into the LaTeX community. With your help, perhaps we can.

All the best,

Lloyd R. Prentice

Primary packages

Package beaulivre
Write your books in a colorful way
https://ctan.org/pkg/beaulivre

Package book
A class for typesetting books
https://ctan.org/pkg/book

Package elegantbook
An Elegant LATEX Template for Books
https://ctan.org/pkg/elegantbook

Package koma-script
A bundle of versatile classes and packages
https://ctan.org/pkg/koma-script

Package memoir
Typeset fiction, non-fiction and mathematical books
https://ctan.org/pkg/memoir

Package novel
Class for printing fiction, such as novels
https://ctan.org/pkg/novel

Package octavo
Typeset books following classical design and layout
https://ctan.org/pkg/octavo

Package scrbook
Koma-Script ‘book’ class
https://ctan.org/pkg/scrbook

Package simplivre
Write your books in a simple and clear way
https://ctan.org/pkg/simplivre

Package tufte-latex
Document classes inspired by the work of Edward Tufte
Last modified in Catalogue: 2018-04-05 06:35
https://ctan.org/pkg/tufte-latex

Package willowtreebook
Easy basic book class, built on memoir
https://ctan.org/pkg/willowbook

Package zztex
A full-featured TEX macro package for producing books, journals, and manuals
https://ctan.org/pkg/zztex

Dependencies?

Utilities?

lualatex

latexmk
Fully automated LATEX document generation
https://ctan.org/latexmk

Non English packages?

Publisher-sponsored packages?

Sent from my iPad
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