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

[Peter Flynn]

On 04/06/2022 23:06, Lloyd R. Prentice wrote:
> Help us reach out to more than 1.6 million self-publishers in need
> of your professional guidance.

Very interesting.

> Naive selection criteria: Packages that are as easy as possible for 
> self-publishers to understand and use.
Are we assuming that the self-publisher are also self-designers?

> 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.

I think worse — no-one has ever even heard of LaTeX, and if they have, 
they think it's something college students use for term papers, and a 
few journals doing math. Before we can start proselytizing, we need to 
dispel the misinformation and rumor.

A stumbling-block to watch for is the level of typographical knowledge. 
The hardest thing to write is simple explanatory documentation about a 
feature, when the publisher is unaware that the concept of this feature 
even exists, because the tendency is to embark on explanation before you 
can write documentation.

> Primary packages

fontspec — please can we use this opportunity to get away from CMR and 
Type 1 fonts? All books must be Unicode UTF-8 (which is going to be 
required anyway if conversion to EPUB3 is envisaged), so let's start as 
we mean to go on. Fonts can be OpenType or TrueType.

biblatex — by the same token, please let us leave behind the old bibtex 
program and the .bst files.

geometry — the only worthwhile way to set the page geometry

enumitem — if there are going to be lists, this is the easiest way I 
have found to specify their appearance

xcolor — the svgnames option provides access to well-known colors

hyperref — if the document is going to be usable electronically, readers 
are going to expect things that look like they ought to be links to be 
clickable. Let's not disappoint them.

[Can someone with a good knowledge of accessibility add whatever is 
needed to ensure books satisfy the relevant moral and statutory 
requirements for disabled use?]

multicol — preferably not: it works in print but not on screens unless 
you're talking about VERY small quantities.

lettrine — drop caps

parskip — explain early on that you can either indent paragraphs but not 
have space between them, or have space between them and not indent them. 
I know a clever designer can do other things but I think we need to 
stick to the basics.

ragged2e — if they want \RaggedRight with hyphenation

graphicx — essential for all images

listings — if there is any code to be quoted, this is the way to go.

float — if there are figures and tables, there will be demands for them 
to be placed where LaTeX doesn't want to put them.

Probably more later

> Dependencies?

UTF-8 from stem to stern means using a competent editor/IDE. Most of 
them are excellent, but publishers must be weaned off using Notepad.

> Utilities?

Make

A versioning repository like git, subversion, etc

A good bitmap graphics editor like GIMP or Photoshop

A good vector graphics editor like Inkscape


///Peter

-- 
Peter Flynn
Cork 🇮🇪 Ireland 🇪🇺