Oh, I just saw your post about this a couple of days ago. Your book looks beautiful! I was so tempted to do full color, but didn't think the finances made sense for my book. I'm totally jealous you went that route. :)
How did it end up working out? I assume it's process, not spot color. Is the colored text still sharp enough to be read easily?
> Instead I begun on some scripts converting my HTML into Latex automatically. Most of this work was done by `pandoc` and a list of regexes that redefines "unholy". God only knows how it all worked in the end. I found various Latex solutions for the pullouts, and syntax highlighting.
Smart! I considered this route a little bit, but I spent some of my formative years doing "desktop publishing" back when Aldus PageMaker was still a thing, so I looked forward to doing it a more hands-on, designery way. It worked out well for me -- the time I spent in InDesign was really enjoyable -- but I can definitely see how it wouldn't be the right choice for others.
> Essentially it is very difficult to copy-edit a book with so many code blocks, even with the help of Latex. This is the only part of the process where I felt down on my skills, and that someone who does it for a living would not face the same problems (probably they wouldn't be using Latex in the first place).
It's a relief to hear someone else say this. Trying to keep the code blocks from being split was really really hard. Halfway through the process, I started flipping through my copy of SICP to see how they did it. As far as I can tell, though guys are just absolute wizards. Every page is completely full and yet code blocks are almost never split across pages. Granted, Scheme snippets tend to be fewer lines of code, but they still did an amazing job.
> Unfortunately createspace doesn't seem to do a good job of printing the cover, so it didn't look precisely like the supplied image I made.
I've done some print work before, so I was fully expecting some variance here. Unless you have a carefully calibrated display and keep track of color profiles through the whole pipeline (and they do too), there's always some difference.
In my case, it came out surprisingly close to the image I sent, but I tried to keep the design pretty simple and not use too much detail or color.
> The nice thing about my approach was that when people send pull requests and corrections to the website I can automatically integrate them across the ebook and print versions, and if I ever do want to make updates in future the process is relatively painless.
Yeah, this part will be rough for me. The print version is basically a fork at this point. Any changes I make, I have to manually make in both the markdown (eBook + web) and InDesign (print).
> But at the end of the day unfortunately it hasn't derived me satisfaction worth the effect it took to produce - which was a lot - and I think that is just due to the nature of the thing, not it's success or position in the world.
For what it's worth, I'm really glad you made it, and I'll be buying a copy.