How I Under-Engineered My Book

(chriskiehl.com)

42 points | by goostavos 21 hours ago

6 comments

  • ifh-hn 4 minutes ago
    I finished a BSc and an MSc with quarto and fossil. It had to be in Word so I wrote a VBA script that pulled comments so I could edit my markdown files easier.
  • noir_lord 31 minutes ago
    The related Over Engineering Post - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49335292

    Does seem like overkill but everyone scratches their own itch.

    • mlyle 10 minutes ago
      I have added tooling so that I can get code listings into / out of the textbook that I'm writing so that I can easily and make sure that they work and produce correct code.

      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).

  • hyperhello 8 minutes ago
    Is there a word for the right amount of engineering? Kind of a negative concept of not engaging in performative conceptualization. Just doing it in a way that the implementation was natural and not worth writing home about.
  • paulorlando 16 minutes ago
    And here I've just been using pen/paper for outlining and notes and then GoogleDocs for mine.
  • emil-lp 34 minutes ago
    Why not Markdown - pandoc - epub/pdf?
    • hk__2 4 minutes ago
      Not OP but probably to be able to tweak the layout without having a doctorate in LaTeX templates.
    • saaaaaam 6 minutes ago
      Presumably because the publisher takes the manuscript and does all the formatting and so on.
  • schnake 50 minutes ago
    This is very close to the philosophy behind something I've been building:

    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.