To recap: I’ve written and published a novel
on-line. CafePress has a
print-on-demand system set up so that you can self-publish your books
with no upfront costs–instead, they take a cut of each book.
Consequently, I’ve resolved to try publishing my book through CafePress
while spending as little of my own money as possible.

To publish a book through CafePress, you need to provide them with two
things: a PDF file containing the text of your book, suitable for
printing on the appropriate size paper, and image files for the front
cover, back cover, and spine. I’ve chosen to work on the PDF file first,
and in the last installment I settled on LaTeX as
my tool of choice for producing it. (If you’d like to start from the
beginning, you can go here.)

So far, I’ve managed to convert the HTML text of the novel into LaTeX
format and print out the resulting PDF file on letter-sized paper. I had the
resulting manuscript (now there’s a misnomer) comb-bound at Kinko’s, and
gave it to my brother in hopes that he might read it and feel moved to
put together some cover art for me. At the very least it would be a
refreshing change from wine labels.

Here’s what I have left to do:

Persuade LaTeX to typeset my book attractively on 8″x5″ paper (standard
trade paperback size).

• Design the page headers.
• Lay out the front matter (title page, et cetera, et al).
• Possibly get an ISBN number; I don’t know what’s involved there, but
  apparently it’s doable. That would make it theoretically possible to
  list the book at various on-line bookstores.
• Design the cover.

To aid me in the first three of those items, I’ve bought a couple of
books:
LaTeX: A Document Preparation System, and The LaTeX Companion.

My approximate expenses to date:

• The LaTeX books: $100
• The bound manuscript: $5 for the comb binding at Kinko’s, plus
  half-a-ream of inkjet paper.

I know I’ve let myself in for accusations of inconsistency by spending
$100 on books when I could have gotten Adobe Acrobat for that price; but
frankly the books have a longer shelf life, and as Jane says I’d have
spent the money on some kind of books anyway.

In the next installment, I hope to share some nicely formatted front
matter. Stay tuned!

Michael Green is an Anglican priest; he was also one of the speakers at
the Plano
West conference, which is where I bought this book, a detailed study
of the Acts of the Apostles.

Acts is the fifth book of the New Testament; written by St. Luke the
Evangelist, it picks up where Luke’s gospel leaves off, with the events
in Jerusalem in the days and weeks after Christ’s resurrection. Early on
the focus is on St. Peter, but before too long the focus shifts to St.
Paul and remains with him to until the end of the book. All told, the
narrated events span thirty years, thirty years in which the Christian
faith spread from Jerusalem to the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire.

Should you ever visit the north of England, go to the city
of York and tour Yorkminster Cathedral. Don’t miss the undercroft.
Renovations there uncovered the remains of two previous churches and a
Roman camp dating back to the New Testament era–and in the Roman camp
they found Christian graffiti. It’s been conjectured that St. Paul
converted some of his Roman guards during one or another of his spells
in prison, and that the poor fellows were shipped off to England as
a result.

Now, consider the distance between Jerusalem and York. Consider that
Christianity spread purely by personal contact and individual persuasion.
Christians were the least of the least in the Roman world; they had no
political power, and no way to coerce belief. I might add, Christianity
continued to spread in this peaceful way, occasionally suffering great
persecution, for over two-and-half-centuries, until finally a Christian
sat on the Roman throne.

One might contrast this peaceful process with the history of Islam,
which was allied with political authority and spread by military force
from its inception. Constantine’s conversion was hailed as a great
deliverance by Eusebius and others, and in the short term they were
certainly correct; with him the intermitten waves of persecution finally
came to an end. But in him the Church found itself to be the partner of
the State, and that’s generally been a bad thing. I support
the separation of Church and State with my whole heart, not because of
the corrosive effect of a state religion on the state but because of the
corrosive effect of political power on my religion.

Anyway, the whole process began in those first thirty years, the thirty
years discussed by Acts. Taking the remarkably quick spread of
Christianity as his starting point, Green asks, “How did it happen? What
were these early Christians like? How did they live? What did they do,
to spread the Good News?” Rather than taking the book of Acts verse by
verse, chapter by chapter, Green takes in the whole book, scrutinizing
these early believers from many different angles, and drawing parallels
with our current practice–and largely, and fairly, to our detriment.

I found it a fascinating book, both as Church history and as a call to
action in the present day. It’s a rich source of ministry ideas and an
inspiration both. It is, however, aimed directly at a Christian
audience; if you’re looking for a general history of the early Christian
era or an introduction to the book of Acts, you’ll need to look elsewhere.

I disabled comments yesterday for the usual reason; I’ve re-enabled them again.

Remember, if you try to post a comment and are unable, you can always mail your comment directly to me.

In our last installment, I looked at OpenOffice and found it wanting (for my
purposes, at least). Today, I’ll talk about a solution I like
better…but first, some history.

Don Knuth is one of the grand old men of the field of computer science.
In the late 1970s, when he was one of the grand young men of the
field of computer science, he began writing a multi-volume tome entitled
The Art of Computer Programming. And when the first volumes came
back from the publisher, young Don was purely disgusted at what he found.

Computer science, at its base, is heavily mathematical, and The Art of
Computer Programming includes vast quantities of mathematical
notation, some of it rather novel. And young Don considered that the
publisher had done a lousy job of typesetting it. Reflecting
further, he decided that the problem was that he didn’t have the right
tools. And so, in classic nerd style, he took a break from working on his
book and developed a typesetting program he called “TeX” (which, by the
way, is pronounced “tech”, not “tecks”). TeX is really, really good at
putting neatly set type on a page; its algorithm for breaking and
justifying lines is the accepted standard. And it’s really, really good
at mathematical typesetting. And on top that, it’s programmable. But
it’s kind of low-level, and it’s tricky to use.

So in 1985 a fellow named Leslie Lamport came along and wrote a package on top of
TeX that he called LaTeX. LaTeX makes TeX easy to use. You write your
document as a plain text file, and indicate the logical structure
(chapter headings, section headings, etc.) with a special mark-up
notation. The result is somewhat
similar to the HTML used to create the page you’re reading (or, rather,
HTML is somewhat like LaTex, since Tim Berners-Lee didn’t invent the
World Wide Web until 1989); but when you process it, what you get is
nicely typeset output. And using TeX is rather like using HTML–you’re
constantly needing to check your work in a browser of some kind.

I used LaTeX quite a bit for about a year back in the late 1980’s, and
really liked it, using it for memos and software documentation both.
Eventually I switched to a different project using different hardware,
and didn’t have TeX readily available to me; after that I languished along with word
processors until I started using HTML in the mid-1990’s. I took to
HTML like a duck to water. HTML’s one defect, as I saw it, was
that it didn’t have a macro language; it was memories of LaTeX that later led
me to remedy that lack with a tool I call Expand. And somehow I never went
back to using LaTeX.

So a couple of weeks ago I started looking into free ways to produce
high-quality PDF output–and ran into an interesting name: “pdflatex”.
LaTeX and PDF together? Interesting! Perhaps, just perhaps…. So I
went looking for a LaTeX system for my PowerBook–and Googled my way into a
maze of twisty little passages, all more or less the same. There are
dozens of slightly different TeX distributions out there, all of them
mostly interoperable, and each with its own documentation on-line–and
mostly that documentation is in PDF. It took me quite a while to figure
out where I was and what I was doing and which version of LaTeX I should
use.

I ended up with two packages, the first of which is Gerben Weirda’s
packaging of TeX-Live. TeX-Live is a TeX/LaTeX distribution augmented
with a vast array of add-on packages; it’s maintained by the TeX User’s Group. Gerben Weirda adds a few
additional packages and a very nice installer. Now, LaTeX is a
command-line tool, which is sometimes convenient and sometimes a
nuisance. So the other package I downloaded is LaTeX “front-end” called
TeXShop.
TeXShop provides a tightly coupled editor and viewer so that you can edit
your document, press a button, and see the freshly typeset output
immediately. It’s pretty spiffy.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, so they say. Once I got
TeX-Live and TeXShop installed, was I able to make it do what I need?
The answer is a resounding yes. I spent a couple of evenings reading some
on-line LaTeX tutorials and refreshing my memory. After that, it took me
about an hour to convert the
text of Through
Darkest Zymurgia from its original form (HTML with Expand macros) to
LaTeX format, and there was very little hand-editing involved. I just
wrote a couple of short scripts and let the computer do its thing. And
then all I needed to do to create the PDF file was push a button.

By way of contrast, it took roughly three hours to print the resulting
PDF file on my inkjet printer, so that I could give my brother a copy of
the novel to read. Not too shabby.

There’s still quite a lot to do, of course, before the manuscript is
ready to be uploaded to CafePress.
I’ll talk about that in the next thrilling installment of The Perils of PDF!

So when you’re feeling glum and you need a lift, what do you do? You
look through your library looking for something that’s familiar and fun,
and re-read it. Or, in this case, them.

These are the first three books in the author’s Mageworlds series, which
I’ve reviewed twice before (clicking on the author’s names, above, will take
you to a page that has links to those reviews). They are great fun, if
you like space opera.

Here’s the setup. Beka Rosselin-Metadi is a star-pilot; that’s all she’s
ever wanted to be. She’s also the daughter of Jos Metadi, privateer and
war hero, and of Perada Rosselin, the Domina of Lost Entibor–Entibor
being a planet whose entire surface was turned to slag during said war.
As the Domina-in-waiting, Beka’s life was dominated by politics and court
manners until she ran away from home at age 15 to follow her dream.

Now the Domina has been assassinated, and her father makes her an offer
she can’t refuse: he’ll give her her own ship–and not just any ship, but
his own ship, the armed freighter Warhammer, the ship in which he
did his privateering, the ship in which he led the resistance against the
invasion from the Mageworlds, and (not coincidentally) the ship in which
Beka learned to be a pilot. In return, she has to use her new mobility
to determine who was behind Perada Rosselin’s assassination.
Over the course of the these three books, which form the heart of the
series, Beka does just that, with the help of a large and varied cast
of thoroughly delightful characters. Of course, it’s not as easy as
all that; along the way, she has to cope with a new invasion by the
Mageworlders, who have been languishing in resentment and trade sanctions
since the last war.

The sixth book in the series came out six months or so ago, and has been
sitting on my shelf ever since; I expect that I’ll be getting to it soon.

In our last installment, I promised to relate whether or not the open
source office suite OpenOffice would
solve my PDF-production woes. Before I answer that, though, I’d like to
thank everyone who offered to help in one way or another. I appreciate
your offers, and may yet take one or more of you up on them–it’s too
early to tell, yet. In the meantime, I’ve printed out a copy of
Through
Darkest Zymurgia for my brother Charles, so that he’ll no longer have
an excuse not to have read it.

Now, OpenOffice. Not prolong the suspense, the answer is “Yes and No,
and (finally) No.”

OpenOffice has a long and venerable history. I first encountered it when
it was a Sun Microsystems product called StarOffice, and I didn’t like it
much. One of the things I disliked was that it wasn’t just an office
suite; it wanted to be full-screen with its own desktop. I didn’t really
need it at that point (almost everybody has standardized on MS Word where I
work, and it just wasn’t worth being incompatible), so I was just looking
at it as a curiousity.

Later on, control was transferred to an open source consortium and the
product was renamed OpenOffice. A couple of years ago I looked at an
early version running on Unix under X11; it was better than StarOffice
had been, but it had some unpleasant effects on my color maps, and I
dumped it. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, be happy; if you
do, you’ll understand.)

But CafePress said it was a reasonable
solution, so I went looking. It turns out that there is a freely downloadable
distribution of OpenOffice for Mac OS X; the only quirk is that it’s not
yet a native Aqua app (Aqua is OS X’s window manager). Instead, it runs
under X11. This, by itself, doesn’t bother me; I’m a Unix programmer,
I’ve done a fair amount of GUI programming under X11, and I run X11
programs on my PowerBook all the time. It’s not as pretty, but if it
gets the job done I’m not one to quibble.

My initial experiences were encouraging. OpenOffice installed easily and
without any trouble, and started right up. It’s even pretty zippy for a
Java application; I’m (very mildly) curious how they managed that. The
“Writer” application (the equivalent of MS Word) has a straightforward,
easy to understand interface, and inside of an hour I’d produced a short
PDF file that printed very nicely indeed.

Still, there were some hurdles. Like Word, using Writer successfully is
all about defining styles. And Writer has a confusing array of
pre-defined styles, and there are half-a-dozen different kinds: character
styles, paragraph styles, page styles, chapter styles, and several others
that I don’t remember at the moment. The key to success was clearly
going to involve understand the different flavors and the predefined
styles in each flavor, and redefining the predefined styles to suit my
needs. In the software world, this is called “Research”, and it was
clearly going to be a lengthy task.

Still, so far, so good. If Writer’s formatting model is complex, the
on-line help in the current version is surprisingly good. I don’t know
how many times I’ve clicked on the help button in a dialog box, only to
get a help page that simply restates the contents of the dialog box. You
know–there’s a check box that says “Enable Engine Coolant”, and you go
to the help page and it says “Enables the Engine Coolant”. There’s never
any word on why the software has an Engine, what the Engine does, or why
it might possibly need Cooling. But the OpenOffice on-line help actually
is fairly helpful, and between that and the information at the OpenOffice web site I’m sure I could
have figured things out.

So I started trying to use OpenOffice to write up some tutorial material
I’d written about Snit, my
Tcl object framework–and ran face first into The Font Problem.

What’s The Font Problem? X11. X11 was one of the first widely available
windowing systems, and one of the first to do high-quality screen fonts.
But that’s a long time gone, and the X11 font model is seriously showing
its age.

We Windows and Mac users have become accustomed to high-quality fonts
that look the same on the screen as they do when printed. It’s not even
an issue for most of us; we take it for granted. Oh, how gladly I have
forgotten the halcyon days of my youth, when TrueType was but a dream and
all the cool kids installed Adobe Type Manager! But OpenOffice has the
font problem in spades. It tries to solve it by converting the Mac’s
fonts to a form it can use, but it doesn’t do it very well, and this
makes font selection a truly difficult task.

OpenOffice makes available to you all of the fonts that it knows about.
Some of them are purely screen fonts; the printed output will look
different. What You See Is Not What You Get. Some of them are
purely printer fonts; the screen will look different. Same problem.
Some few work the same on both the printer and the screen–but for many
of these, OpenOffice picks up the different styles–bold, italic, and so
forth–as being different fonts.

If I picked Palatino, for example, and tried to use bold or italic type,
it all looked like normal type on my screen. The PDF output was fine;
but it was impossible to tell, while looking at the screen, whether a
given piece of text was italicized or not. Not good.

I found, if I recall correctly, two fonts that worked for both screen and
printer, and had all their styles, and they weren’t fonts I wanted to
use.

In other words, I was going to have spend a fair amount of time learning
how to use OpenOffice’s formatting system to get the book to look right
just so that I could print it in a font I don’t like. No thank you. Add
to that the file format issue, and the answer was clearly no, not unless
I couldn’t find a better alternative.

The file format issue? I’m a programmer. I like plain text files. I
have text in plain text files that I wrote when I was in college twenty
years ago. I can still read those files. About fifteen years ago, my
wife and I put together a “family cookbook” in MS Word; I’m not sure now
that it was even Word for Windows. Later, I converted those files to
WordPerfect 5.1. Later, well…I’ve still got those WordPerfect 5.1
files, but I don’t have a machine that runs WordPerfect 5.1. What I’ve
got is a text editor called Emacs with which I can open those files,
delete all of the special characters, and recover the actual text. It’s
a pain, but I can do it.

I’ve seen file formats come, and file formats go, and text files go on
and on and on. I’ve no particular desire to marry a project like this to
yet another ephemeral file format, unless there’s a compelling reason to
do so.

So I turned away from OpenOffice, to try a different approach. An older
approach. An approach that suits my skills and prejudices.

Don’t miss the next installment of The Perils of PDF!

In Publication On $0 A Day I talked about the print-on-demand
publication service offered by CafePress, and my interest in using
it to publish some of the stuff I’ve got in my head, including my novel
Through
Darkest Zymurgia. In this post I’m going to talk about getting here
from there.

The first requisite, naturally, is something to publish, but as I’ve already
got a candidate I shall pass lightly over the topic and go on to the
next, which is creating the PDF file for upload to CafePress. This is a
two-part problem. First you need to acquire a tool that can save a
document in PDF format, and second you need to put your book into a form
the tool can use.

In my case, Zymurgia exists as a set of plain text files (I’m a programmer, I
like plain text files) and as a set of HTML files. Either of these can
be turned directly into PDF by a number of means, none of which will
result in a nice-looking book. So I’m going to have to massage the text
into some other format.

If I wanted to take the high road, I’d buy a copy of Microsoft Office and
use Word; or, better yet, a dedicated package for doing page layouts like
Adobe’s InDesign or FrameMaker. But that costs money, and my stated goal
is to produce this book as cheaply as I possibly can. But let’s suppose
someone else were to buy me a copy of Office–would my joy would still
not be complete. I’d have a tool that can produce high-quality output,
but I still wouldn’t have PDF, because Word doesn’t know how to produce
PDF. For that, I’d need a copy of Adobe’s Acrobat Distiller, which also
costs money.

(An aside–I’m writing this on an Apple Powerbook running Mac OS X. Any
program that can print on OS X can produce PDF files automatically; this
capability is supplied by the operating system. Very cool.
Unfortunately, the resulting PDF files are optimized for display, not for
printing.)

So the question is, what freeware tools exist that will produce
publication-quality PDF output? On a hunch, I went to the CafePress
website for an answer to this one. And CafePress pointed me at
OpenOffice, an
open-source office suite that produces good quality PDF output.

Will OpenOffice save the day? Find out in the next episode of The Perils
of PDF.

Since I began homeschooling my daughter, I’ve begun reading aloud to her
daily again. When she was in public school, homework took so much of the
evening that it impossible to read aloud on a regular basis. Now, however,
the only school work we do in the evening is a run thru of the flash cards
I’ve made up to drill her in Latin phonograms. So, I had to come up with a
book that would be entertaining and yet still be a stretch for her vocabulary.
The educational goal here is to increase her vocabulary and teach listening
skills. That’s the rationale I gave my husband for reading aloud to a 14-year-old
who can read to herself. The real hidden agenda I have is to spend some time
cuddling on the couch with my teenage daughter while sharing a good story.
Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes fit the bill perfectly.

Since this book has been reviewed by both Will and me in the past I will skip
the normal plot summation. I did find reading it aloud to be a bit of a
tongue twister at times. Polysyllabic words I can silently read
automatically don’t trip off my tongue quite so easily and my daughter had
gotten to listen to Mommy sounding out a few herself. That’s a good thing.
She’s also been told to stop me whenever a word is used that she’s
unfamiliar with so we read with the dictionary next to us on the couch. That
also is a good thing. But the best part is that the book is almost funnier read
aloud. Abby identified with the fifteen year old Mary and guffawed thru
several passages when Mary let fly with her highly mature, highly
intelligent and very sarcastic comments. And I’m hearing the “Can we read
now, Mom?” question again when she’s wanting a little cuddle time with Mom.
She also commented that it’s all she can do NOT to pick up the book and read
ahead when I’m not around. What could be better?

Chris Johnson of Midwest Conservative
Journal recently announced that he’d written a book entitled Frank and I: The Final
Disillusion of a Life-Long Episcopalian. Chris has been covering
the long, slow meltdown of the Episcopal Church on a daily basis over the
last couple of years, and the book collects a number of his posts. But
given that I’ve already read most of them, what interests me more is how
he got the book published.

When I first wrote Through
Darkest Zymurgia, I had every intention of shopping it around,
and I even went so far as to send to Tor Books. The rejection came back
by return mail; clearly, they hadn’t even read past the cover letter. I
did a little nosing around, and some reading, and came to the conclusion
that to get my book published the traditional way I’d have to work really
hard and spend a lot of my spare time on it, and that even if I
succeeded, which was unlikely, the chances of making serious money (by
which I mean enough money to quit my day job) were slim and none. I
wrote Zymurgia for fun; it simply wasn’t worth my time to make the
effort to get it published in the traditional way.

Now, there’s an alternative of long standing for those who want to
publish a book in the worst way, and that’s the vanity press. And you
really do end up publishing your book in the worst way–you pay them a
lot of money you never get back, and you get boxes of books you have no
room for. Now, some folks have actually made money this way–but they
spend all of their time marketing their books. Let’s say it together:
“This is a hobby!”

More recently, the vanity press has branched into the world of
publication-on-demand. There are (or, at least, were) several
on-line firms where you upload your manuscript in electronic form, and they
give it an ISBN and undertake to get it listed at Amazon.com and such-like
places. Usually this costs you a “nominal” fee; plus they are happy to
take more of your money by selling you “manuscript consulting” services.
I looked into a couple of these places, and then I Googled them, and
the impression I got was Not Good. I discovered a number of folks who
felt ill-used, and that these outfits were not giving value for
money–indeed, once books sold were not passing the money back to the
author as they ought.

But Chris, now, Chris has published his book through CafePress. If you’re not familiar
with CafePress, they got started selling custom T-shirts and coffee mugs
on-line. It’s easy, and it’s free. Here’s how it works: first, you
design the graphic you want to have on your T-shirts. Then you go to
CafePress.com and “create a store”. This is the website on which you’ll
sell your T-shirt. Then you use their website to upload your graphic
position it on your T-shirt, jersey, handbag, coffee mug, frisbee, or a
host of other things, and put them up on your store. And then you get to
set the price for each item. CafePress sets a minimum price for each one;
you can stick with that price, and sell your items at cost (I’ve done
this), or you can set the price as high as you like.

The bottom-line is this–it costs you nothing to sell merchandise through
CafePress. If no one buys your merchandise, no one buys it. You make no
money, but also you spend no money. You’ve got no inventory, and no
fixed costs. CafePress is willing to spot you the storage space on their
servers in the hopes that maybe they’ll make a few bucks off each item
you sell.

Well, it so happens that CafePress is now in the publication-on-demand
business, and works just the same as the rest of their services. You
write your book, format it as a PDF file, create graphics for the book
cover, and upload the whole shebang. And you set your price, and if
anyone buys your book you get the difference between your price and theirs
delivered to your bank account.

This is very cool, and it’s the way it should be. And given that I’ve
got a book or two in me that I’d like to see in print, I think I’m going
to take advantage of it. And given that I’ve got a blog, I’m naturally
going to document every step of the process.

Tomorrow: The Perils of PDF.

I’ve just uploaded the latest version of Snit, my Tcl/Tk object framework, to the Snit Home Page. Any Tcl programmers in my audience are encouraged to take a look at the README file.