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Comment by daturkel | Hacker News Reader

The book looks great. I don't have any experience in crypto really but will certainly be taking a look at the early chapters here for a foundation.

edit: ignore the below, just got to this explanation in the book!

> The entire Crypto 101 project is publicly developed on Github under the crypto101 organization, including this book. https://github.com/crypto101/book

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Excuse me if this info's on the website (I can't get to it right now, HN "hug of death" it appears), will you be open sourcing contribution to the book? I'm not saying it's necessary or that I even recommend it, just curious about your authorship model (and noticed the CC license at the beginning).

Also, did you make the book in LaTeX (or some TeX variant)? If so, will you be sharing the source? I always love looking at other people's TeX documents.

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> Latex source

Check the github link you posted, the book is right there. I also like looking at other people's tex files. The book was written with orgmode, so this could be a double treat, you get to see the tex as well as the orgmode used to generate the pdf.

UPDATE: The choice of non-free fonts is a peculiar choice. The math text looks a little strange in places. I am not sure if there is a package to fix up the math font for caslon, ie. one similar to the minion package. The euler fonts would work for a mathfont. Why not use something from texlive so that anyone can build a copy of the book that looks like the original and/or submit improvements? Everything looks nicer when you turn on microtype.

Thanks for the suggestions! I think that being able to build on standard free texlive installations would be a wonderful feature, but this the first time I've heard of the microtype package. Are you saying I can just turn it on and it'd be better? I've skimmed the CTAN entry and it suggests that it'd work with most fonts; does that include the ones I'm using now? (If so, does that mean that "use free fonts" and "use microtype" are two different tickets?)

Thank you very much in advance. I've created two tickets for this: https://github.com/crypto101/book/issues/60 and https://github.com/crypto101/book/issues/61.

Microtype is different from " use free fonts." Microtype allows for:

  "character protrusion and font expansion, furthermore the adjustment 
  of interword spacing and additional kerning, as well as hyphenatable 
  letterspacing (tracking) and the possibility  to disable all or 
  selected ligatures."

I will follow up on github. Are you planning to have the book printed? The recto/verso margins can be distracting.

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