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

[Lloyd R. Prentice]

Outstanding! 

Thanks, Peter.

LRP

Sent from my iPad

> On Jun 4, 2022, at 7:10 PM, Peter Flynn <peter at silmaril.ie> wrote:
> 
> 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 🇪🇺