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Comment by radarsat1 | Hacker News Reader

I ask this as a totally naive person regarding novels and publishing, but who is fairly happy with writing papers in Latex: what is difficult about typesetting a novel? I ask because I would think that novels would be on the easier end of typesetting situations, but clearly your experience is different.. I just can't imagine what you are struggling with. I've "typeset" many novels by converting them from text formats to latex for the purpose of reading on my e-reader and haven't had many difficulties other than dealing with unsupported character encodings. Of course I can imagine that the professional situation is quite difficult, but I'm surprised it's so different. Care to share details of the trouble you had?

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I've typeset novels, technical manuals, math, poetry, articles, chess diagrams, posters, presentations, my resume, and probably a bunch of other things in LaTeX. It wasn't a big deal, though it's definitely a rabbit hole in terms of the amount of tweaking that's required if you want everything just right, if you're doing something fancy, and if what you're doing doesn't quite fit any of the many pre-written templates. The great thing, though, is that once you've tweaked one document the way you like it, now you've got a template to use for documents of the same type, which should only require minor tweaking in the future.

There's definitely a learning curve to LaTeX, but not a huge one, as it's mostly just a markup language. If you want to get in to the programming side of it, or if you want to learn one of the larger LaTeX packages really well, that would take you more time, but not even then it shouldn't scare anyone, particularly if you've learned other high level programming languages before. Diving in to TeX itself could be a different story, but I can't comment since I've never bothered to learn it myself, and haven't had to for anything that I've done with LaTeX.

Anyone who wants everything “just right” and is particular about what that means – and doesn’t have to make more than 2 documents in a particular template (or maybe even if they do) – should just start with InDesign, and save hours of trouble.

Where LaTeX shines is for cases where you don’t really care about the details of the layout, but just want someone else to handle it all in a somewhat sensible way when you hand them a basic manuscript, and not shit all over itself the way MS Word does on a regular basis.

LaTeX is great for generic college papers where you don’t have figures and don’t have time to worry about the layout. By contrast it’s a huge pain in the butt for something like magazines, coffee-table books, or posters.

(It’s also the best way to typeset mathematical formulas, of course.)

Well, for doing fancy stuff including complex programming macroses LuaTeX suits much better these days.

That doesn't answer the question. To me as a common reader, the typesetting of a novel requires in no particular order

- nice block text adjustment, line-breaks and hyphenation, line/paragraph,chapter spacing

- margins and padding, page numbers, and chapter headings

- font selection, supporting ligatures and kerning if you are fancy

I'm sure the devil is in the details, but how much detail can there be in basic running text? I'm fine reading novels rendered by basic html engines without css, even in monospaced font. The most important consideration for a text layout engine seems to be the font data format and corresponding font engine, which I don't know much about, because I don't really care.

Getting otf fonts working, getting images working and properly positioned, getting alternating left-right headers to behave themselves, especially at a chapter start. Every new thing involved going back to ctan (I had high hopes for memoir) or searching online in the hopes that someone took the time to write down how they did it. Most of the time you'd just find "how to make your math formulas look pretty" or "how to typeset your thesis"

You'd think that typesetting a novel would be a gimme, but in the current ecosystem (tex or otherwise) it's a shambles.

OTF is dead easy if you use XeTeX (specifically the xelatex command). The fancyhdr should give enough control over headers. Yeah, floating images can be annoying.

I use it mainly for technical documentation (product manuals, etc.), so I've never tried the memoir class. But what I find myself doing mostly these days is makinng my own classes, usually based on article because it seems to me to have the most 'neutral' defaults.

It's a very steep learning curve, but I've found it an extremely valuable technology to be able to use.

Asking questions on the TeX stack overflow is a pretty good way to get help also.

I agree with the last point: asking questions on tex.stackexchange is a GREAT way to get help. Sometimes you run into an "impossible" problem and some wizard will show up and fix it in minutes.

XeTeX and the KOMA document classes really bring you a long way.

Hm. Font stuff I'm not surprised, fonts can be tricky especially in Latex, you're definitely right. Bit surprised images were difficult. I guess I haven't had to deal much with margin and header issues. fancyhdr can certainly be confusing. Did you try "lyx"? I guess for what it does help with, it might not actually make any of these particular issues easier..

Of course, it's all about using a good template. Usually I find there are tons of resources out there, but it does often involve finding someone with the same problem and asking the right question.

I'm typesetting a series of novels with LaTeX and memoir and I share your pain. I didn't have much trouble with fonts (fontspec is pretty awesome compared to the old TeX way), but things like typesetting on a grid, that was difficult.

I'm now reading on ConTeXt and it seems to be a much more adequate TeX format. For one thing, it supports grid typesetting! LaTeX's philosophy is to separate style and content, leaving the style to "someone else". It seems that ConTeXt's philosophy is to separate style and content, but still make it easy for the user to choose the style. It's also more integrated: comprehensive core, few third-party packages, meaning less compatibility issues (but less choice too). I'll definitely try it for my next project.

> typesetting on a grid

what does this mean? I haven't seen that term before. I assume it's nothing to do with tables..

The main idea is to have every line of text fall on an evenly spaced grid. Here's an example where the middle paragraph is not grid aligned: https://i.stack.imgur.com/XskJu.png

Generally you also want the baseline of titles to fall on the grid. Possibly also the formulas, figures etc.

LaTeX is pretty bad at this: by default it inserts stretchable vertical space between paragraphs, and around things like bullet lists, centered text and formulas.

Stretchable space is a good thing when you have a lot of elements beside simple paragraphs: it gives TeX flexibility to produce a nice page layout. For example the optimal spacing around equations might not be a multiple of the inter-line space. And you might still want to have the last line land precisely at the bottom of the page, so there must be a stretchable space somewhere. This flexibility also helps avoiding widows and orphans[1].

On the other hand I think non-grid-aligned text looks terrible for novels, especially when the page is thin and you can see through the paper the text on the other side (it's much less noticeable if the lines on both sides are perfectly aligned). Grid typesetting is also nice when you have multiple columns of text on the same page: it looks odd if the lines of one column are not aligned with those in the next column.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans

I have round about never seen images in a novel, but every other novel mentioned on HN seems to have images.

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