How I Under-Engineered my Book | Hacker News Reader

How I Under-Engineered my Book

chriskiehl.com

67 pointsgoostavos22 comments

The related Over Engineering Post - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49335292

Does seem like overkill but everyone scratches their own itch.

I have added tooling so that I can get code listings into / out of the textbook that I'm writing so that I can easily and make sure that they work and produce correct code.

And I'm doing it in LaTeX so I have templates doing some work.

But it's sure nice to just be able to type `make` and see a pdf pop out and green unit tests on the code 3-4 minutes later.

(I have also standardized TODO things to make them easily searchable and show up in a distinctive style in the manuscript).

When I was working on my thesis, I had an appendix of annotated source code that was generated by a series of Julia macros that effectively turned my code inside out to make a LaTeX document. The custom macro-comments became the bulk of the LaTeX source, the code got wrapped in some environment that presented it with syntax highlighting and all that.

I was halfway through implmenting the syntax highlighting Vim plugin for the resulting Julia-LaTeX hybrid format when I realized that I had an actual deadline coming up, and just accepted solid-color LaTeX source.

I mean that honours the legacy of how TeX came to be - in spirit at least.

> This method, dating back to the 19th century, produced a "classic style" appreciated by Knuth.[6] When the second edition was published, in 1976, the whole book had to be typeset again because the Monotype technology had been largely replaced by phototypesetting, and the original fonts were no longer available. When Knuth received the galley proofs of the new book on 30 March 1977, he found them inferior. Disappointed, Knuth set out to design his own typesetting system. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX#History

> overkill

To write my hard sci-fi novel, I wrote a cross-platform Markdown editor so that I could use interpolated variables along with R code:

https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html

ConTeXt produces the PDF files. I also developed a few calculators to help confirm physics and other plot-related aspects:

https://autonoma.ca/calculators/

Do you have somewhere an article or similar about the motivation behind this project, i.e. how did you went from "I write a novel" to "I need to write my own editor to write my novel"? That would be really interesting!

The closest would be the Typesetting Markdown series, which centers around using interpolated strings as variables inside prose:

https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-markdow...

Is there a word for the right amount of engineering? Kind of a negative concept of not engaging in performative conceptualization. Just doing it in a way that the implementation was natural and not worth writing home about.

Even-engineering?

I think there’s value in the concept of “an uninteresting amount”. When I cooked breakfast I used my stove and a pan and stuff and I put some seasoning on. Even though I enjoyed my morning routine, I’m unable to produce any fascinating trivia about the process or the result.

Good question, sometimes engineering that leads to a creation which is “purpose built”.

This is arguably what MVP is supposedly to mean

Yeah. It's "engineering".

Wikipedia's introductory paragraph to the subject includes the following sentence:

> Engineering involves balancing competing demands such as safety, performance, aesthetics, cost, laws and regulations, and time, while operating within fundamental limits such as the laws of physics.

(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering)

I realize the word is overloaded now and that people are confusing writing programs and other cerebral pursuits with engineering, but that doesn't change its original definition.

I finished a BSc and an MSc with quarto and fossil. It had to be in Word so I wrote a VBA script that pulled comments so I could edit my markdown files easier.

Why not Markdown - pandoc - epub/pdf?

Presumably because the publisher takes the manuscript and does all the formatting and so on.

Not OP but probably to be able to tweak the layout without having a doctorate in LaTeX templates.

I did LaTeX -> pandoc -> print ready pdf & epub.

I really liked it because I have infinite layout control with LaTeX, and it’s a full blown programming language with if statements, operator overloading, functions, etc etc. makes it really easy to have one source document that does different things when outputting to different formats.

And here I've just been using pen/paper for outlining and notes and then GoogleDocs for mine.

As an aside, timelapse videos like this are a useful proof of thoughtfulness in the age of AI slop

Not really a proof, since AI can generate such videos as well.

This is very close to the philosophy behind something I've been building:

https://github.com/simonschnake/Mark2Tex

I built Mark2TeX while writing my thesis in Obsidian. I wanted to write the prose in Markdown, but keep a normal LuaLaTeX document for math, citations, cross-references, etc.

So Mark2TeX lets me use Markdown-like files and drop into real LaTeX whenever I need it.

I deliberately didn't try to build a complete Markdown/Pandoc replacement. It's basically an attempt to under-engineer the Markdown/LaTeX boundary.

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