I think it’s fascinating to see all the different ways that techfolk who write fiction set up their writing pipelines. Some people go with a bare-bones coding editor like Vim; others use “pro” tools Scrivener. And then there’s the typesetting pipeline. Using troff is pretty out there.

When I started writing fiction, here’s what I came up with. I write in Google Docs because it’s lightweight, works everywhere, and can easily export to Markdown format. From there, I manage the Markdown source in Git and Emacs. For typesetting—I cannot abide crappy word-processor output—I used to use Pandoc to generate LaTeX markup and run LuaLaTeX to produce PDFs. But that took several seconds. Now, I use Typst to go straight from Markdown to PDF files. It’s pretty much instant.

If you want to see what the output looks like, here’s the first chapter of my current project:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Wl4k_rdYGFZp-r5nq864r5CNzD1...

(Notice: This is a typesetting sample, not a writing sample. It’s my W40k-adjacent fanfic, so you have been warned.)

It’s set in 12pt Erewhon, which is an enhanced version of Andrey V. Panov’s Heuristica font family, which extends Robert Slimbach’s Utopia font family. Slimbach is a sublime type designer—he created Minion—and Utopia is one of his early works that is especially spirited.