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

[Lloyd R. Prentice]

P.S. I assume that most self-publishers will be designing their books. So tutorials on book design definitely deserve inclusion in the book scheme website.

I also agree that we need to convey typographic concepts. The key is cut-to-the-chase, constructive, engaging, and fun tutorials and documentation.

My take on what we’re trying to accomplish is twofold:

1. Assume something over 1 million books are self-published per year in the U.S. alone. These authors invest many hours and high hopes into their books. But stats tell us that sales of the vast majority of these books is dismal to bleak.  

We can’t help these authors publish better content. But we can inspire and help them publish trade quality books and, in doing so, encourage them to up their quality game.

2. Recruiting writing talent into the TeX community may advance the technology in interesting and constructive ways.

Best wishes,

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