Did the author create the Christian novellas he's mentioned? Can't tell by the phrasing. That would be impressive enough on its own, combined with the tech stack?

  D. J. Speckhals is the author of the “Witnesses of the Light” historical fiction trilogy, which transports readers to fifteenth-century Europe to explore the resilient faith of the Waldensians.

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, WeasyPrint, and ghostscript. This also allows me to use git for version control, and I can make formatting changes using vanilla CSS. My tools are currently too crude for the average non-tech writer to use, but they save me hours every time I use them.

For any of you hackers out there looking for an untapped market, try making a user-friendly tool that converts Word, PDF and/or similar formats to the print-ready PDF/X-1a, PDF/X-3 and PDF/X-4 formats. At the moment, all the existing tools are proprietary and expensive, and many are difficult to use. This won't be a big money maker, but it will certainly be welcome by many indie authors.

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 edited and not a bunch of line diff noise no matter which engine you use. Only problem is it breaks my yy, dd, cc muscle memory, as AFAIK you can't force those to work on virtual (vs logical) lines.

AKA what CS PhD students have been doing ~forever.

I guess this is like medical researchers "discovering" basic calculus or an office worker discovering that SFTP, sshfs, and git work fine and they don't need Dropbox after all.

What's common knowledge in one field can apparently still be alien to people outside the field, even in the age of LLMs.

Just wait until the author finds out about Overleaf...

As someone who worked for years in commercial print, before most manufacturing moved overseas, I recall the workflows the article discusses as being more automate-able than the author seems to understand. For example, "Making the slightest change became a chore. [1.] Update the 'master' DOCX. [2.] Update the InDesign file ..." --the appropriate way to use an external document as master in InDesign is to use the Place command, which autoupdates text changes as they are made in Word. As another example, InDesign supports multiple formats of EPUB by direct export. I also question the author's familiarity with common LaTeX workflows. "'Why didn’t you just author it in LaTeX? ...' you might ask. [B]ut I prefer writing novels in a word processor, not a text editor." And, "How do I convert an ODT file to TeX?" Word processors offer exports of all kinds, including to plain text, and the purpose of a TeX editor is, like InDesign, to typeset text that is often written elsewhere. Capturing the styling from the word processor seems antithetical to the desire for an advanced typesetting tool.

Overall, as a technical writeup I enjoyed the article; however, I would caution that the author seems to approach publishing from an amateur perspective.

Hopefully some of the writers are reading this:

I love buying and reading physical books. However, about half of the books (I read mostly programming books) have letters that are printed pixelated. This is infuriating to me. No one bothers to run a trial print and see what comes out?

The root cause of this: PDF will look fine, but the text color is usually set slightly off black (why!!??). The eye couldn’t really see the difference and PDF renders smoothly. However, commercial printers couldn’t handle that properly.

Solution: set the text color to full black, you are using (most of the time) black and white printer!

You might need to have two PDF versions: one for printing and one for digital distribution (but why would you have off-black text anyway?).

Setting up good book publishing pipelines with version control + CI/CD might sounds simple, but I don't think it's trivial.

One of the best examples of this that I've ever seen is The Sourdough Framework [0] -- really impressed with the way that versioning and publishing is integrated in that book.

And yes -- I know it sounds like yet another Javascript library -- but it's actually a book about sourdough bread making. It's been discussed here several times before, but this one from 2023 [1] may have been the most popular (103 comments)

[0] - https://github.com/hendricius/the-sourdough-framework [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35961590

Pandoc, typst, openleaf, asciidoc, quarkdown… all of them are text-based and you can achieve almost everything with them. The only exception is a magazine or newspaper or leaflets or brochures layout that can be profesionally made with Affinity or InDesign. (I am talking from 25 years’ experience in typesetting.)