Ross A. Laird

It’s done: two years, nine chapters, 70 thousand words. And, along the way, many dead-ends, reversals, and uncertainties (including, at one point, the chucking of close to a hundred pages).

But it’s done. And I’m happy with the result. Now I move on to editing, copy-editing and publishing. This process requires, among other things, preparing the document in a file format that is both accessible (to those who might work on the text in digital form) and flexible (for presentation purposes that will likely be part of my publishing negotiations). If you are a regular reader of my posts here, you will be familiar with my loathing of word processors (reminder here) and of my habit of writing in plain text (with vim or emacs). For this manuscript I am using plain text lightly marked-up with tags for the LaTeX typesetting engine.

LaTeX is remarkable. It offers the capability of typesetting plain text documents using design principles inherited from the long traditions of printing. The text remains in its native format, but is marked-up with — in my case, a small number — of formatting tags. These tags are read by the LaTeX engine, much like html is read by a web browser, and output to the page (or to pdf, or to whatever format you like) with a level of precision that is unmatched by any other typesetting system.

I have bookmarked a few LaTeX-related items on my del.icio.us page, for those who might be interested.

Typesetting is fun; just like writing, but with more flexibility to make global changes and test them out. Fun indeed. And now I have a small amount of time to tinker in this way, to learn and test and discover. Then, starting in January, on to the next book.