Blissing Out on the Details

September 12, 2009 in life, programming, Uncategorized | 2 comments



Bookbinding Project Gains Momentum, originally uploaded by johntynan.

I remember, years ago, reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and how Robert Pirsig blissed out on attention to detail. Well, I don’t know what precipitated this, but lately, I’ve been absolutely pleased to take my time with any number of projects, from restoring a pair of $100 Rockport tennis shoes that I trashed during a painting project, to raking up a years worth of detritus and pruning every living thing on our front lawn, to this, my long-time bookbinding project.

In addition to getting back up to speed with the ReST to Verse process as described here, I am now getting up to speed with some of the finer points of the Verse and Booklet plugins for LaTeX. Next step is to bind the printed signatures and more.

Either way, I hope to maintain this attention and keep writing about the results.

  1. Name’s avatar

    Name on September 17, 2009 at 5:41 am

    I wish to God my blog archive were back up, as there's a lot on book design there & some might be of use to you. But it isn't just yet.

    How come each of your blog entries is repeated? That asked, I'm curious why you chose LaTeX, simply because it's free? Were you familiar with it before this project? If not, how you finding the learning curve? I mean, it IS more of a programming language than software.

  2. johntynan’s avatar

    johntynan on September 17, 2009 at 6:05 am

    Stephen, I'm not sure why all the blog entries are repeated. I just changed the theme for my blog, and this is a residual issue that I'm going to have to look into.

    I appreciate the offer of the information on book design. Last Christmas, my father-in-law took me to a bookstore in downtown Los Angeles and I picked up the book:

    “Typography & Typesetting” by Ronald Labuz:
    http://openlibrary.org/b/OL2381827M/Typography_…

    as well as “More Making Books by Hand”:
    http://openlibrary.org/b/OL3291781M/More_making…

    which have helped to get me started, but I'm sure I may have a few questions that will come up, in context.

    The idea of using LaTeX arose from a long-time friend telling my how great TeX was for typesetting several books that he had written, so I had that in the back of my mind. But really, the issue was more that I wanted to write on any number of devices (mobile or laptop) using a simple markup language, specifically ReStructuredText, and pair this with version control software (in this case SVN) to track revisions. This works great, by the way, it is really simple and allows you to keep track of all revisions as well as keep online backups.

    I went through several ambitious tests with a programmer friend where the process evolved into converting the plain text files into LaTeX using the python module docutils. This sounds more convoluted than it really is, but once it's set up, it's a breeze.

    I found that only have to maintain the index file in LaTeX. And this index file's syntax is really intuitive.

    So there's not a ton of working with the programming language, the only time I delve into code is when I do the conversion, and this is simply a batch command that rarely changes.

    I'll send you the information for accessing the repository so that you can look at it online (or even download it to your computer) and have a closer look.

    Thanks!

Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *