Skip to content →

Tag: LaTeX

design decisions

Published June 28, 2005 by lievenlb

We are nearly done, I hope. One can keep on tweaking
parameters endlessly, so at regular intervals we grab our chief graphics designer and tell him :
decision time! which of the two is best? At the moment, we decided on
our own chapter-style \chapterstyle{neb} which is an
adaptation of the _demo-style_ in
memoir.cls (see on the left). We also have our own page-style which
is an adaptation of the _companion-style_ (the house-style of the
LaTeX Companion series).

You
will notice that the page-format is a bit odd. As mentioned before, we
didn’t want to copy the _regular_ mathematics-book -look.
We went for a fun format (square, 7.5 by 7.5 inch ; think of an inflated
CD-box) as well as a handy one (so we will go for _spiral-bound_
books). The reason for this is that we noticed that the most consulted
copy of version 2 around at the department is
Stijn’s which has a nice coil binding so you can always lay it
nicely flat on a desk, whether you just want to look something up, or
use it to explain something at the blackboard.

Perhaps you can
even see that the font is slightly smaller than the _regular
10pt_. Memoir allows for a _9pt font_ and this looks _so
much_ better. Besides, it helps to keep the number of pages
reasonable, and related to this : keep the production costs low. At the
moment the plan is to be able to sell a book of say 260 pages under 13
Euros (that is, 5 EuroCent/page), but more on this next week.

What else? Well, recently, we decided on the
_copyright_-license (at least for the first book). Clearly, all
neverending-books will have their own ISBN-number
and the copyright is one of the
Creative Common
Licenses. At first we thought of taking the same one that protects
(however, see mewt’s story
) this site and which is, in technical terms, a by-nc-nd:be
license. But, in the end, we decided to go for a Developing Nations
License. Here\’s why :

The Developing
Nations license allows, for the first time, any copyright holder in the
world to participate first-hand in reforming global information policy.
The fact is that most of the world’s population is simply priced
out of developed nations’ publishing output. To authors, that
means an untapped readership. To economists, it means “deadweight
loss.” To human rights advocates and educators, it is a tragedy.
The Developing Nations license is designed to address all three
concerns.

So, what else needs to be done by next
week when we hope to launch our first book? Well, I need to write some
_blurb_ and we have to decide on front- and back-covers.
Tomorrow, I hope to report on how that one ended.

Leave a Comment

neverending.sty

Published June 23, 2005 by lievenlb

You don’t
know how lucky you are to be able to begin a LaTeX-document with
something like \documentclass[a4]{amsart}. This simple line
tells the machine what the size of paper is it has to print to, which
part of that paper has to be filled with text, what the design of
titles, sections etc. is (and probably more). Just convince yourself
(for the sake of argument) that you want to produce a readable
mathematical book on paper of dimensions say 6 by 9 inch. How would you
do this? Simple : all you have to do is to adjust certain TeX-parameters
the way you want! Well, that’s exactly what the _neverendingbooks
design department_ has been doing for the last couple of weeks!

The package we would use was easy enough to find. A long time ago, Geert suggested that we
should use the
memoir package. The fun starts the moment you are foolish enough to
print the manual : 300 pages! After an inspiring account of
book-printing basics over the ages, you are told that you have total
freedom to set your _stock paper size_, how it needs to be
_trimmed_ to get the final result, how you should designs
everything from the title, over abstract, acknowledgement, thanks, table
of contents contents, dedications etc. down to chapter, section and page
styles. In short : ULTIMATE FREEDOM!!!

But, as some of you may
know from experience, there is nothing more frightening to the moderate
autist (and frankly, are there any other mathematicians?) than ultimate
freedom! So, we set up a task-force, had daily brain-storm sessions,
produced numerous trial-prints and eventually came out with something
that came very close to the _better designed book_. Let’s face it
: can you name me _one_ (yeah right, just 1) well-designed
mathematical book? If you don’t believe me, browse through the recent
mathematics-books on amazon (as our design-department
did for a whole week-end, deprived of beverages and other pleasures).
Found anything? Yes?? Please, please let us know! On the other hand, if
you browse through the Art, architecture and
photography section you will spot several extremely good-looking
books very soon. Well, after a week we succeeded in designing the
_arty-farty-fanshi-wanshi_ (as PD1 would name it, jealous that
she was not in on the fun) mathematical book! And, what did we do with
the labours of all this hard work? NOTHING! We simply dropped the whole
idea (if you are a graphics-designer trying to survive within a
mathematics publishing firm (not easy we know, you have all our
sympathy) and want to do something more fun, contact us and if we can
reach an adequate financial agreement we will be happy to send you our
ideas).

So, what went wrong? Nothing really, it just dawned on
us that _NeverEndingBooks.org_ should not go for the
better-designed mathematics book. All our (potential) authors can
publish as easily at Oxford University
Press, the European Mathematical
Society or, if they have no moral objection, at the AMS. So, why
would they choose us instead of these more established publishing
houses? Just because our books look slightly (well let’s face it : a
lot) better? Probably not. We, at neverendingbooks.org should not go for
the better-designed book, we should not go for the book concept at all,
we should invent something entirely NEW & SEXY & USABLE & DESIRING & (I
hope you get the drift!). Next time, I’ll let you in on the first ideas
of our design-department!

Leave a Comment

markLaTeXdown

Published May 20, 2005 by lievenlb

Clearly,
an extended version of Markdown
including LaTeX-commands would be useful for mathematicians and surely
I’m not the first to think about this. In fact, I found a somewhat
pompous text New adventures
if hifi text by someone claiming to have done precisely that (though
he doesn’t give much details nor post a version of his altered program).

Still, it is pretty clear how to convert a _Markdown+LaTeX_
textfile to plain LaTeX (at least for regex-lovers
). Modify the _Markdown.pl_ script so that the Markdown markup is
translated not to HTML-tags but to LaTeX-commands.

More
interesting material can be found in a thread on _Markdown and
Mathematics_ starting with this post. In it, they search for a good way to include
LaTeX-mathematical commands in a MarkDown text. In fact, this is part of
a more general quest for a good _escape character_ in Markdown to
create _Markdown plus something_ versions. They opt for
{{ and }} rather than the usual
$ signs.

I think the alternatives [
tex ] and [ /tex ] are slightly better because
then you could feed the text to a functional WordPress installation with the
LaTeXRender plugin installed and copy the relevant part from the HTML-source of
the resulting post to get a HTML-version of the mathematical text with
all LaTeX-code converted to pictures. Clearly, typing the suggested tags
is somewhat cumbersome so I would type them using the
{{ and }} proposal (one
{ is not enough because a lot a LaTeX code uses single
curly brackets) and then do a global replace to get the
LaTeXRender-tags.

Even more interesting would be to have a
version of the html2txt.py script for LaTeX, that is,
converting a LaTeX-file to Markdown + LaTeXcode which would give an easy
way to convert your existing papers to HTML if you feed the LaTeXRender
plugin with all the required newcommands and packages.

Leave a Comment