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Comment by ggambetta | Hacker News Reader

Congratulations on the publication, such a fantastic achievement! Can imagine how happy and proud you must be feeling right now :)

I'm curious about the choice of LaTeX. According to the article, it was about controlling the layout. I did something similar [0] a few years ago, but my "stack" was Markdown + Pandoc; converting Markdown directly to an epub with Pandoc was more than enough, but for the paperback version I converted the Pandoc to a LibreOffice document with a custom template; this let me do all the fine-tuning for the styles, paragraph flow, etc.

I wonder if you tried this and decided LaTeX was better, or if you went for LaTeX due to your previous familiarity with it. I have the feeling that for my novel it would have been overkill; did you get most of the value by having precise control of the layout of the images?

(btw, the "Power Move One – Conditionals" anchor seems to be broken)

[0] https://gabrielgambetta.com/tgs-open-source.html

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> I wonder if you tried this and decided LaTeX was better, or if you went for LaTeX due to your previous familiarity with it. I have the feeling that for my novel it would have been overkill

Don't know about the author, but having written a few lecture notes to be converted to pdf and html, I have found that writing the source document in LaTeX is much more convenient than markdown, especially for math-heavy text. The LaTeX->pdf conversion is natural, and then you can convert easily to html+mathjax using a simple script.

A variety of markdown formats, for example R Markdown, support latex math syntax. The markdown document ends up being compiled to latex anyway, so markdown in this scenario is just a easy way to write latex with less hassle.

Yes - pandoc supports latex math if the `tex_math_dollars` extension is enabled: https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#math

For a technical book I fully agree, my other book [0] is written in LaTeX. But this doesn't seem to be the case for OP, and definitely wasn't the case for my novel, so I'm curious :)

[0] https://nostarch.com/computer-graphics-scratch

I've published 20+ books, mostly fiction, using LaTeX (specifically XeLaTeX), as there are a host of fine-tuning tools available through packages, basic settings that can be played with, and the built-in spacing that just looks...better. XeLaTeX also allows using pretty much any font you like, along with easy typographic control down to letterforms. I also like the ability to play with book/page/margin sizes that can be tested with a couple small changes to the source document & a recompile. I'm not sure I would recommend learning LaTeX just to do this, but if you're familiar with it, the rewards are there.

Microtype package works best with XeLaTeX, it allows finer control over the spacing/kerning and cleaning up the tex that cause some weird errors during compilation

I self-published a 300 page book through Ingram in 2012. It is pretty niche and only sells about 200 physical and 50 or so Kindle copies a year. The whole thing was done in LaTex with a Tufte book package; there are a few tables and images but the vast majority is text.

Have had many unsolicited comments from those who have handled/thumbed through it about the high quality of the book (look/layout/feel) - most are surprised that it was not done by a 'big' publishing house. Frankly, my own opinion is that the quality is at least equal, probalby higher, than what is being churned out today by big names today. Part of that is the format/layout as a result of using LaTex, the rest is the physical material characteristics from using an excellent printer. None of that speaks to the actual content, of course :)

I did eventually make a kindle version, unfortunately I do not recall the tool chain used.

Highly recommend Lightning Source (Ingram) for your printing/distribution needs if you are serious about your publication.

I can imagine that your way of doing things becomes very complicated once you want to do edits and now have two types of files to keep in sync all the time (md and office).

The point of OP is that you keep one type of file. Also doing mass edits or source control with office must be a nightmare.

I can’t even imagine how hard it must be to get details right as well. As horrible as latex is, it still gives you much more control.

In my case the canonical text is the markdown file. The LibreOffice file is then generated using Pandoc from the markdown file + a document template for the page and paragraph styles. So there's no manual sync to be done, just edits on the markdown file and running a script.

> Congratulations on the publication, such a fantastic achievement!

Eh? With all the great tools and self-publishing options available these days, publishing a book is not a fantastic achievement. In fact, anyone can do it. Writing a book is no achievement either, especially if it is not of great quality. It simply takes a bit of time.

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