Comment by Exoristos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Exoristos | Hacker News Reader

As someone who worked for years in commercial print, before most manufacturing moved overseas, I recall the workflows the article discusses as being more automate-able than the author seems to understand. For example, "Making the slightest change became a chore. [1.] Update the 'master' DOCX. [2.] Update the InDesign file ..." --the appropriate way to use an external document as master in InDesign is to use the Place command, which autoupdates text changes as they are made in Word. As another example, InDesign supports multiple formats of EPUB by direct export. I also question the author's familiarity with common LaTeX workflows. "'Why didn’t you just author it in LaTeX? ...' you might ask. [B]ut I prefer writing novels in a word processor, not a text editor." And, "How do I convert an ODT file to TeX?" Word processors offer exports of all kinds, including to plain text, and the purpose of a TeX editor is, like InDesign, to typeset text that is often written elsewhere. Capturing the styling from the word processor seems antithetical to the desire for an advanced typesetting tool.

Overall, as a technical writeup I enjoyed the article; however, I would caution that the author seems to approach publishing from an amateur perspective.

The place command does not autoupdate. At least not in the most recent version.

Text is either embedded, in which case it's baked in, or linked, in which case you have to manually tell ID to update the link to reload the text.

But InDesign's EPUB output is horrifically terrible, especially if you're trying to use custom fonts/graphics for page headings. (Basically - no.)

And the CSS is... really not great.

The best fiction off-the-shelf option for EPUB gen is Vellum. It's a one-off payment of around $250 and you can get an EPUB-only version, or EPUB+PDF for print. It's not very customisable, but the presets - there aren't many - all look good.

For anything more sophisticated, options are limited. I spent far too long creating a non-fiction EPUB in ID a couple of years ago. I got there in the end but it was an extremely painful process and I ended up automating a lot of the workflow in JSX.

For fiction I created my own MD -> EPUB pipeline with a custom MD -> HTML parser for custom markup not handled by pure MD. Then a custom EPUB builder which does all the wrapping and general EPUB bureaucracy based on my own CSS.

Python has libraries for Pandoc, native DOCX, and MD (up to a point) so the basics were all there. The rest was glue.

It was a moderately-sized hobby project - would probably go much faster with AI now.

> The rest was glue

Oh how often I keep saying that these days... "All the parts are there! Why hasn't anyone piped this into that?"

Then I check 30 to 90 days later and sure enough, at least one person has done it.

Yeah, OP’s answer tells me why the big publisher’s EPUB books have always been subpar.

> Overall, as a technical writeup I enjoyed the article; however, I would caution that the author seems to approach publishing from an amateur perspective.

I also worked at a publishing company (for ~6 years) in the early 2000s. While you are right that the pros have some tricks to make the process easier, the fact remains that the process is not easy at all. Unlike in academic publishing, where nothing stands between the author and the reader, at a commercial publishing company (at least one of the majors), there are legions of people working behind the scenes. Editors communicate with authors; editorial assistants help the editors with fact-checking, drafts, basic organization and comprehensibility; copyeditors get all pedantic about formatting and word choice (sometimes resulting in arguments with authors that the editors need to smooth over); production departments that make the books look pretty, contain images whose copyrights are cleared and that can be legibly printed within a reasonable budget; graphic designers who develop house styles or even a custom style for a book and even original cover art; lawyers who negotiate copyrights for excerpts, images, and other ancillary materials; and on and on.

I know all this because I worked on a custom content management system for this company and in so doing I discovered that the process was incredibly complex. One of the major pet peeves of everybody involved was when an author thought they were doing anybody a favor by trying format things in Microsoft Word. Most of that information was thrown away and the real layout was done by people who thought in terms of widows, orphans, kerning, and leading (and so on). Once you know what all the people in a top publishing company do, the difference between an amateur publication and a professional one becomes immediately apparent. So I don't fault the author for getting a bit technical. The SE approach sounds like an epic attempt to make a complicated subject at least somewhat approachable.

When we get a Word doc from an author it is sent to the typesetter for reformatting. A standard set of style codes is applied and other corrections made so it can be directly imported into the design template. This the version the copyeditor works on. Also: once proofs are set this version is basically trash. In ye olde dayes, when this was all done on paper, the edited ms would eventually go back to the author, but sometimes they didn't want it. Now when the book is done the production manuscript files get deleted.

For ebook production, you could definitely do worse than follow Standard Ebooks' method. That will get you a decent standards-compliant file with basic accessibility features accounted for.

Maybe we worked at the same firm. You never know.

I worked at Bedford/St. Martin, now Macmillan Education. It would be hilarious if you worked there (or at our nemesis one floor down in the same building).

> Once you know what all the people in a top publishing company do, the difference between an amateur publication and a professional one becomes immediately apparent.

Any advise for developing this sense?

I will never work in a top publishing company but I have been able to approximate good design by first studying the fundamentals, then reproducing the layouts I see in popular media. I can make text into a beautiful book, and I see poor design choices in the corporate communication billion dollar companies.

But it feels like there’s a lot more I don’t know, and you never know what you don’t know, and it makes me wish I could absorb more from working under an expert.

There's no substitute for apprenticeship (by whatever name). Unfortunately, skills of this kind may be close to extinction. For someone like you just interested in getting better at layout design, I'd recommend something like 'The Elements of Typographic Style', by Bringhurst; this concentrates mostly on books, but much applies to other layouts. Of more general interest -- i.e., beyond layout design -- might be 'An Encyclopedia of the Book', by Glaister. There's a wealth of valuable design and print resources from the '60s - '90s if you can find them -- some libraries still have high-quality examples, but most have replaced them with much less-valuable contemporary resources. Look for book and magazine sales by university departments, businesses, etc.

Thank you! I have been absorbing Bringhurst methodically the past year.

I had not heard of Glaister, will be on the lookout.

Good point about library and corporate sales. My main supply of materials from the 60s has been from estate sales -- not for instructional materials, but for well composed period pieces. Older letterfaces and color palettes are so evocative; seeing the label of a 70 year old oil can with so much more personality than the products of today makes me want to bottle this style for my own future use. And it feels good to hold something back from the landfill.

Have to say I'm finding the story of your efforts so far uplifting. Keep up the good work, and good luck.

“A Few Notes on Book Design” is also worth a read.

https://texdoc.org/serve/memdesign/0

If you have a decent TeX distribution installed you have a copy for long flights.

The trouble with our age is that, despite the abundance of intermediate-level information, expert teachers in specific, and shrinking, professions are as hard as ever to access, if not more so.

I did't know what widows and orphans are so I looked it up.

> Widow (sometimes called orphan)

> Orphan (sometimes called widow)

> Runt (sometimes called widow or orphan)

Yeah I'm glad we programmers are not the only ones bad at naming things...

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

I am firmly convinced that the customary mapping of widow/orphan is back to front. You’re really trying to convince me that the one that has been cut off from its antecedents is the widow? It should obviously be the orphan.

So, no wonder people confuse them, because the popular mapping is wrong.

> It should obviously be the orphan.

But it isn’t obvious that a line cut off from its descendants should be a widow, so that mapping isn’t ideal either.

I propose “bereaved” — a parent cut off from its children.

Yes! All the typographical techniques and terminology is fascinating (and confusing at times). Widow and orphan control really fight against text justification. Finding the right balance is tricky, but LaTeX has all the little knobs to tweak and find what's right for your uses (fiction for me).

Would just like to add that academic publishers have to deal with a lot of rubbish too.

Trying getting the psychology department to use anything other than O365. We have our own typesetting contractors who deal with the muck they produce.

> sometimes resulting in arguments with authors that the editors need to smooth over

This is an understatement. A friend of mine is a published author in a field that requires correctness. The "legions of people" all got in the way, continuously introducing errors and unable to use a system with any kind of change control, so my friend had to keep rechecking the whole thing and finding further errors that had been introduced without being told about them. This included introducing errors of fact as well as simple things such as not fixing references to areas that they themselves changed. This was from an established publishing house and apparently this is normal. As far as I can tell, the roles that once added professionalism have been eroded both in skill and in budget, such that now they fail to make use of technology and just get in the way. They didn't seem to add any value in my friend's case, anyway. Perhaps it does add still add value to authors who start with a low standard of work. And perhaps the quality of publishers varies massively, resulting in hugely different experiences.

> For example, "Making the slightest change became a chore. [1.] Update the 'master' DOCX. [2.] Update the InDesign file ..." --the appropriate way to use an external document as master in InDesign is to use the Place command, which autoupdates text changes as they are made in Word.

It does not auto-update. Even if it did, you wouldn't necessarily want it to auto-update, because it's very hard to tell if changing one sentence in your manuscript has borked the layout of dozens of pages. Once you have rules set up around widow and orphan control, it's very easy for even tiny text changes to have large downstream layout effects.

Also, frankly, InDesign is kind of flaky and will sometimes change layout or make other visual changes in response to apparently nothing at all. I ran into a bug where it would just silently drop underlines on some elements and jiggling them a bit would bring them back.

For my two books, I ended up writing a script that would generate a visual diff of the entire book from the PDF export of the InDesign files so that I could tell for certain if InDesign had gotten itself confused. InDesign can produce beautiful output, but like a lot of Adobe software, it's temperamental and opaque.

For my part, my approach was to set up a Word .docx file with styles, which would import into Adobe InDesign, mapping style-to-style, and if need be, pre-process w/ one or more AppleScripts and page as normal, then when it was time to return the edited manuscript to the author(s), select all the text and remove over-rides and export the text as a .rtf from InDesign, open that in Microsoft Word and re-save as a .docx.

Hi, OP here. I'm glad you enjoyed the writeup.

Amateur...you're probably right. It reminds me of my home improvement project I've been working on this evening: interior painting. My ceiling lines are probably perfect to houseguests (if they notice at all). But if a professional painter got up on a ladder and looked closely, he'd probably shake his head and chuckle.

As for InDesign and EPUB, I've found the auto-generated output not up to the standard I was after. Worse, I've seen output differ between InDesign versions, which scared me.

I have an acquaintance who works for a "Big 5" publisher, and he recounted their process to me once. In short, the indd file became the source of truth. They would generate an EPUB from it but then hand edit it for many hours to bring it up to their house style. If there was a text change (rare in fiction) they update the indd and EPUB separately. Going back to the Word file is basically non-existent. If the author, copyeditor, proofreader had more extensive changes (like a full revision), it was close to a brand new publication.

The visual styling from the word processer isn't interesting. It's the "tagging" that paragraph and character styles bring that's helpful. It's not dissimilar from an HTML class, which scripting can transform into truly semantic text. I hope that clarifies some points. BTW, it's pretty cool to hear from people in the real print industry. I'm always fascinated by their workflows.

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