Making of

making-of/Makefile

@@ -28,10 +28,6 @@ toc: plain ## full book with ToC re-rendering in case of page changes
 	makeindex book
 	xelatex book.tex
 
-.PHONY: ebook
-ebook: ## render ePub file from LaTeX
-	pandoc Ebook.tex -o ../ebooks/book.epub -t epub3 --wrap=none
-
 .PHONY: frame
 engage-frame: ## turn on frame marking
 	cp includes/_frame.tex includes/frame.tex

making-of/content/003.tex

@@ -75,7 +75,6 @@ To help simplify this process, I made a \texttt{make} target which pandocs all M
   Easy, as they say, peasy.
 \end{ally}
 Lemon squeezy.
-\newpage
 
 Deciding what to put into the book was almost as hard as writing the content itself. Deciding what to put in, where to put it, and how to display it when suddenly left without the benefits of clickable links was overwhelming.
 
@@ -124,22 +123,167 @@ In order of appearance:
     Merriweather Sans}[Color=4444AAFF]\end{verbatim}
 \end{description}
 
-\newpage
+One of the things that I've had a lot of fun with throughout this project is the style of the text, as well as having played around with the colors, as is perhaps obvious with the way I treat you.
 
-Typesetting funkiness (surgery poem, speaktome)
+\begin{ally}
+  You know you love it.
+\end{ally}
+I do.
 
-\newpage
+Another thing I started poking at when working with the site was unique presentation of text beyond just blockquotes.
 
-full-page pictures
+Part of that was to do with poetry. Early on when working with poetry and web publishing, I defined a new block in Markdown that would let me write how I wanted and have it show up (pretty close) to that on the screen. I wrap a block in triple single-quotes and it winds up in a \texttt{<div>} that has the \texttt{white-space: pre-wrap} style set. This lets me insert ridiculous spaces just how I want.
 
-\newpage
+\begin{ally}
+  Ridiculous spaces for the ridiculous Maddy.
+\end{ally}
+It's not all that bad.
 
-pdftk for attaching covers
+And hey, it's easy enough to accomplish in \LaTeX, too. Just stuff it in a \texttt{verse} environment. Indentation is as easy as using the \texttt{\\vin} command, which indents the line by\ldots{}well, however large a space you set the verse indentation length to be.
 
-\newpage
+At one point, however, I decided to fuck with some more complicated spacing. Given how focused \LaTeX\ is on layout, it's maybe no surprised at how much easier this was to accomplish than in HTML.
 
-Generating index\footnote{Aw heck, really? --- page \pageref{indexmunge}}
+\begin{ally}
+  And yet you were.
+\end{ally}
+I suppose, yes. Part of the problem was going from how difficult things were in HTML and just kinda\ldots{}expected they would be here, too.
 
+Anyway, there were two that I wanted to accomplish. First, and easiest, was the spacing for portions of the surgery poem. While most of that poem was fairly simple in structure: sixteen stanzas of the two of us talking, consisting of rhyming couplets with a trailing line. That was all well and good, but, on describing the sensation of anaesthesia, I decided that the text should go all wibbly as well.
+
+In HTML, this required quite a few repetitions of \texttt{\&nbsp;} to space out the words. It was probably not the best way to do it--
+
+\begin{ally}
+  Oh, but the heady intoxication of repetition\ldots{}
+\end{ally}
+--as I could have accomplished much the same as with the \LaTeX\ \texttt{\\phantom} and the verse environment's \texttt{\\vinphantom} commands, which create an amount of horizontal space equal to the length of the text in the argument. That is, just use a set of \texttt{<span>} tags with transparent text to space out the visible words. Bit harsh on screen-readers, as it would mean plenty of the lines would be repeated--
+
+\begin{ally}
+  How appropriate.
+\end{ally}
+--upon reading, but it \emph{is} being used as a visual medium here.
+\end{leftcolumn}
+\begin{rightcolumn*}
+\begin{ally}
+  And was it?
+\end{ally}
+Was it what?
+
+\begin{ally}
+  Death.
+\end{ally}
+Of a sort, yes. You will have to read the book to see.
+\end{rightcolumn*}
+\begin{leftcolumn}
+
+As mentioned, it's much easier in the print version:
+
+\begin{verse}
+\vinphantom{Nothing.} Was this death?\\*
+Nothing. \phantom{Was this death?} Nothing, death? \phantom{Nothing,} nothing.\\*
+\vinphantom{Nothing. Was this death? Nothing, death?} Nothing,\\
+\vinphantom{Death?} Was this death?\\*
+Death? \phantom{Was this death?} Nothing.\\*
+\vspace{1em}
+\vinphantom{Death? Was this death? Nothing.} There was nothing.\\
+\end{verse}
+
+\noindent This is accomplished with the aforementioned commands:
+
+\begin{verbatim}
+\vinphantom{Nothing.} Was this death?\\*
+Nothing. \phantom{Was this death?} Nothing, death? \phantom{Nothing,} nothing.\\*
+\vinphantom{Nothing. Was this death? Nothing, death?} Nothing,\\
+\vinphantom{Death?} Was this death?\\*
+Death? \phantom{Was this death?} Nothing.\\*
+\vspace{1em}
+\vinphantom{Death? Was this death? Nothing.} There was nothing.\\
+\end{verbatim}
+
+Secondly, I wanted to vastly reduce the line-height for a section of verse. In CSS, I need only set the \texttt{line-height} property to something less than 1. Thankfully, in \LaTeX\ the \texttt{spacing} package exists for this. 
+
+\end{leftcolumn}
+\begin{rightcolumn*}
+\noindent Note that this must be centered or otherwise not indented, or the first line of the paragraph will space itself separately.
+\end{rightcolumn*}
+\begin{leftcolumn}
+
+\begin{verbatim}
+\begin{Spacing}{0}
+speak to me\\\vspace{-7pt}
+speak to me\\\vspace{-7pt}
+speak to me...
+\end{Spacing}
+\end{verbatim}
+
+leads to:
+
+\end{leftcolumn}
+\begin{rightcolumn*}
+\begin{ally}
+  Can you imagine so blinding a sight?
+\end{ally}
+Yes. I could see it with my eyes closed.
+\end{rightcolumn*}
+\begin{leftcolumn}
+\begin{center}
+\begin{Spacing}{0}
+speak to me\\\vspace{-7pt}
+speak to me\\\vspace{-7pt}
+speak to me\\\vspace{-7pt}
+speak to me\\\vspace{-7pt}
+speak to me\\\vspace{-7pt}
+speak to me\\\vspace{-7pt}
+speak to me
+
+that i may see\\\vspace{-7pt}
+that i may see\\\vspace{-7pt}
+that i may see\\\vspace{-7pt}
+that i may see\\\vspace{-7pt}
+that i may see
+
+the face of god\\\vspace{-7pt}
+the face of god\\\vspace{-7pt}
+the face of god
+\end{Spacing}
+\end{center}
+
+A few locations in the book require full-page illustrations. This is surprisingly difficult using the usual \texttt{\\includegraphics} command from the \texttt{graphicx} package, as there's a lot of page layout stuff that happens before and after the image itself is included.
+
+Rather than trying to include the image, however, it is startlingly easy to just include a PDF within \LaTeX. Using the \texttt{pdfpages} package, all I need to do is save the image as an appropriately sized (that is, 8.625"x8.625") PDF and then use the \texttt{\\includepdf} command instead. \LaTeX\ will manage all of the page numbers accordingly, and I don't have to worry about splicing it after the fact.
+
+Speaking of, for the digital version (as well as for this PDF), attaching the cover(s) to the final PDF \emph{does} require some splicing. This is made very easy with the \texttt{pdftk} command.
+
+\begin{verbatim}
+pdftk cover-front.pdf cover-back.pdf internal.pdf \
+  output digital-edition.pdf
+\end{verbatim}
+
+\texttt{pdftk} commands are just read from start to finish, so the above says, ``Take these three PDFs and output them all to the single file, digital-edition.pdf.''  As a longer example, providing a sample from the book works like so:
+
+\begin{verbatim}
+pdftk book.pdf cat 1-63 output intro.pdf
+\end{verbatim}
+
+which says, ``Take book.pdf, concatenate pages 1-63 and then output them into intro.pdf.'' It's a pretty neat command.
+
+
+The last step of the process was generating the index.\footnote{Aw heck, really? --- page \pageref{indexmunge}} Back when I was writing \emph{everything} in \LaTeX, I remember this being far harder than it actually turned out to be.
+
+Wherever you want an index entry, all you nened to do is put \texttt{\\index\{...\}} in the text with whatever the entry is. This supports nexting entries (separated with an exclamation point) and page ranges (referenced with a \texttt{|(} and a \texttt{|)}. So, for instance, I indexed poems like so:
+
+\begin{verbatim}
+\index{Writing!samples!poetry|(}
+\begin{verse}
+Blah blah blah\\
+My name's Maddy and I can't stop writing\\
+...
+\end{verse}
+\index{Writing!samples!poetry|)}
+\end{verbatim}
+
+To generate the index, I have to first run \texttt{makeindex book} (given that the filename is book.tex), then I can run the usual \texttt{xelatex book.tex; xelatex book.tex}. I have to run that twice in order for the page references to be correct, of course.
+
+At the beginning of the book in the preamble, I include the \texttt{makeidx} package and immediately run \texttt{\\makeindex}, and at end of book.tex, where I want the index to appear, I call \texttt{\\printindex}.
 \newpage
 \end{leftcolumn}
 \end{paracol}

making-of/content/004.tex

@@ -68,15 +68,60 @@ Of course, then I read the docs and it turnsout that this is a known problem. Th
 
 \section*{Setting color margins in \texttt{paracol}}\label{color-margins}
 
+It is all well and good to set colors for the column background, but this does not, by default, extend to the limits of the page. Having just a bar of color with text in it to the side surrounded by white is not very pleasing.
 
-\section*{munging the index for page breaks}\label{indexmunge}
+To get around this, the \texttt{paracol} packageallows you to set an extent for the colors surrounding the background area. For the background of the text block, one uses the \texttt{c} selector as above:
 
+\begin{verbatim}
+\backgroundcolor{c[1]}[HTML]{aaaaaa}
+\end{verbatim}
 
-\section*{Needing \texttt{Ligatures=TeX} in fontspec when renewing}\label{ligatures}
+and then for the area surrounding it, one uses the \texttt{C} selector. However, there is an optional set of arguments to that selector for how \emph{far} that area should extend beyond the text block.  A good default was to have it extend 60\% of the way into the gutter between the two columns (50\% risked a thin white stripe between them, and the overlap was still handled gracefully with a higher number), and 10,0000 points on all other sides.
 
+\begin{verbatim}
+\backgroundcolor{C[1](0.6\columnsep,10000pt)(10000pt,10000pt)}
+	[HTML]{aaaaaa}
+\end{verbatim}
+
+I tried to figure out more exact numbers, but it turns out that that is \emph{a)} not trivial and \emph{b)} not worth it because \LaTeX\ does't really care.
+
+\section*{Munging the index for page breaks}\label{indexmunge}
+
+The index is generated blithely. That is, the \texttt{makeindex} command generates a .ind file which contains the basic layout of the index: nested lists of references and page numbers set into columns, each new letter separated by a vertical space as specified by the \texttt{\\indexspace} command.
+
+Unfortunately, without that being any smarter, it's easy to wind up with widows and orphans here, which, when indentation holds semantic content, can cause problems. In the case of \allyWord, the entry for \emph{Mental health}, the first entry under \emph{M}, was the last entry on the page, making the first entry on the next page \emph{anxiety}, which was a sub-entry under \emph{Mental health}. Without that indentation being visible, of course, that was impossible to see.
+
+The solution was, when generating the index, to warn myself that this was the case, and then go into the book.ind file and manually add a \texttt{\\newpage} command right before the \emph{Mental health} entry. Sigh. Such a pain.
+
+\section*{Needing \texttt{Ligatures=TeX} in fontspec when renewing text}\label{ligatures}
+
+That \LaTeX\ provides such fine control over fonts and typesetting is fantastic. It's also a royal pain in the ass.
+
+As mentioned, \allyWord\ uses \XeLaTeX\ specifically for its delightful handling of fonts. When you specify a font in the preamble, it does everything right. However, when you \texttt{\\renewfontfamily} within the document --- say to change the color --- it stops using the proper ligatures. That is \`\` stops displaying as ``.
+
+In order to fix this, one must pass the \texttt{Ligatures=TeX} option to the command:
+
+\begin{verbatim}
+\renewfontfamily\allyFont{Merriweather Sans}[Scale=0.9,
+Color=777777FF,Ligatures=TeX]
+\end{verbatim}
 
 \section*{Various printing problems}\label{printing}
 
+Oh paper, why must you be based in such imperfect reality?
+
+\begin{ally}
+	The treachery of inanimate objects.
+\end{ally}
+Yeah.
+
+There were a few problems with the printing process. The first batch of books came with bleed problems, color saturation problems, and color mismatch problems:
+
+\includegraphics[width=4in]{assets/print-problems.png}
+
+You can see that the ink coverage on some of the pages is so high that it caused the pages to buckle when running through the printer. Additionally, while the intensity of the colors remained much the same as in the PDF, the saturation has been knocked down slightly. The improper bleed is shown by the thin white strips along the colored borders where the printing stopped before where the page was cut.
+
+The last one was on me, but the first two were just due to the mechanics of the printing process. The solution, if I wanted to keep my colors as they were, was to use a thicker paper. This drove up the cost of the book, but I think, in the end, led to a much lovelier product. At \$50 retail, it's steep, but for a book that is more experience than anything, I'm alright with that trade-off.
 
 \end{leftcolumn}
 \begin{rightcolumn}
@@ -181,5 +226,34 @@ Of course, then I read the docs and it turnsout that this is a known problem. Th
   \vfill
 
   \noindent And, of course, thank \emph{you}.
+	\clearpage
 	\end{rightcolumn}
 \end{paracol}
+
+\resetbackgroundcolor
+\begin{paracol}{2}
+\begin{leftcolumn}
+\null
+\vfill
+\noindent So. There it is. A project from start to finish. A story. A file. A book. To start a project is to kill a portion of yourself, and that is what I've done. I've destroyed that bit of me that was there before I began this whole process. It's not there anymore. It's gone.
+
+I feel its loss.
+
+I feel wrung out.
+
+I feel empty.
+
+And for what?
+
+Will this project --- \allyWord\ and this making-of --- go anywhere? Will I somehow gain notoriety of any amount by publishing this? Will they provide others with meaning? With understanding?
+
+I don't know.
+
+\begin{ally}
+	Do you want to?
+\end{ally}
+I don't know. Maybe. Maybe, like everyone else, I just want to be seen.
+\vfill
+\clearpage
+\end{leftcolumn}
+\end{paracol}

making-of/includes/pagelayout.tex

@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@
   % headers
   \fancyhf{}
   %\fancyhf[FRE,FLO]{\pagenumfont\footnotesize\emph{Advance Reader Copy}}
-  \fancyhf[FLE,FRO]{\pagenumfont\thepage}
+  \fancyhf[FLE,FLO]{\pagenumfont\thepage}
   % \fancyhf[HLE]{\chaptertitle}
   % \fancyhf[HRO]{\AuthorFull}
   % \renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0.5pt}