How I Under-Engineered my Book(chriskiehl.com) |
How I Under-Engineered my Book(chriskiehl.com) |
Does seem like overkill but everyone scratches their own itch.
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:
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-markdow...
> 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]