After doing the layout for the first issue of Dewclaw using Scribus, I knew that there must be an easier and more reliable way to do this work.
Miles asked if I’d looked at LaTeX, and after figuring out what he was pronouncing, I said that I hadn’t. I had the impression that it was specialized for technical papers, mathematical formulas and that sort of thing. Well, it is, but people have done the work to make it quite feasible to produce books or magazines using LaTeX.
After some research, I installed the texlive package using Synaptic. After working with that a bit I also installed the latest version of the memoir class manually in my homedir.
I haven’t done a full Dewclaw issue with it yet, but I did lay out a small book called Not That Far, and it worked real well.
I think this will be a much better method.
The biggest limitation that I see so far is that in Dewclaw, each author’s piece may still have to be done separately with special attention to the author’s paragraph preferences and such.
One of the big advantages I see of using LaTeX is that the defaults are really sensible, and fill in the gaps in my book design knowledge. Just throwing text in gives you great-looking pages. After some configuration it is possible to compromise this good design, but the manual for the memoir class includes so much information on book design and history that there is no good excuse for making poor choices with using it.
As you may know if you read Evelyn’s blog Lisp Service, we recently completed the first issue of a literary magazine called Dewclaw. She’s written about the process extensively on her blog, so I’d recommend reading about it there.
The box of books arrived today, so now is the time to buy.
$9 plus $1 for shipping within the US (int’l shipping will cost more).
My role in the publication was mainly doing layout, though I also provided second opinions on submissions and moral support and things like that. This issue includes a poem that I wrote in a style cribbed from Diane Williams about eating at a Japanese restaurant. I like this poem, but I have to give significant credit to Diane Williams and sake.
I have been assigned via a post on Evelyn’s blog to write seven things about myself and assign seven other people to do this.
things about me:
- I have a slight toothache.
- Theme for tonight’s activities: feed & knead
- Upon arriving home from holiday travel, I was delighted to find that 4 species of seeds I had planted germinated and survived without my ministrations.
- I feel that the weakly-linked nature of this exercise makes it difficult to determine who has responded to the prompting. Perhaps that is intended to promote reading additional blog material not strictly related to answering this question.
- My lesions are healing.
- There are four big drafts burning a hole in my blog.
- The promise of doing a little bit of visual design without a lot of consequence, with loose simple requirements makes me a little bit excited.
links to people who may continue this exercise if they wish:
- Ari Cohen
- Kerry
- Josh Larios
- Stephanie
- Alena
- Joe Ball
- Root
Months ago I saw a street view car driving along Ravenna Blvd. while I was riding back to work after lunch. I waved. Now I am on google street view.
View Larger Map
It was released with much fanfare recently, but I am waiting to install WordPress 2.5 until K2 gets a release compatible with it together. I read a post from them that said they were working on it, but they are perennially slow on the releases.
Last weekend I rode in the Taco Truck Time Trial, which was lots of fun. Nobody barfed. Steep hills were ridden on. During the after-party, it started raining, so we had another beer and waited for the rain to stop, but it started hailing and snowing, so we had another and waited it out, but we lost patience and sobriety and eventually went home, and the precipitation didn’t seem like that big a deal, or like it could be tolerated.
I am looking forward to bike camping this summer, and the european bike camping vacation. I’m looking for a nice place to ride to that will simulate riding to the crest of the Corsican mountains at the road to Corte. I guess it’s the Col de Vizzavona.
I have a begonia in my office. When I was
transporting it to my office on my bike, one of
the leaves broke off. Now the leaf has grown into
its own begonia plant. The new plant has four
leaves, including the original one that it grew
from and one small leaf that has not unfolded yet.
I’ve been looking for something with these functions in this kind of a compact keychain form for months. I finally found it at a vineyard on Bainbridge Island while visiting for wine tasting with out of town Minneapolitans Mike and Laura.
It was a bargain at $10. yay!
Nifty Bottle Opener/Corkscrew
form the main frame the main ah-deeur
christen misten masts
grace accomplished failures with real hearing
freakin’ meese all theming feces around me
teasing respite from the greenhorn newbies
repeating a zealot perpetuation treatment
blockin’ on the essay intention
race headlong into frenchmen de dependència¹
construct me a fun crumby punk tongue-depressor
wrest away my censure
create fake multi-major face pressers
replace word frequency summary histograms
with a page containing each word sorted in alphabetical order
color coded
backgrounded at a very small font size
refuting the unpreventability of rhyming thighs
toodleoo the technician’s tired guise
gotta bust this hull before I acrhymeatize
- dependència
[1696; de dependent]
f1 El fet de dependre. La dependència dels efectes a les causes. Estar sota la dependència d’algú.
2 1 Cosa que depèn d’una altra. Vendre una propietat amb totes les dependències.
2 esp Lloc, habitació o edifici que forma el complement secundari d’una construcció o d’un lloc principal.
3 GEOG ADM Territori que depèn de l’administració d’un estat o d’una altra divisió administrativa.3 Conjunt de dependents d’una casa de comerç.
4 1 ECOL Relació d’un ésser viu amb els altres membres de la seva biocenosi i amb els factors ambientals.
2 DR TREB Relació jurídica entre dues persones físiques o jurídiques que dóna lloc a una sèrie de drets i d’obligacions bilaterals.
5 MAT Lligam relacional o funcional entre dues variables o conjunts.
6 MED /PSIC Necessitat de continuar l’administració d’una droga un cop hom n’ha adquirit l’hàbit.
de_pen_dèn_ci_a.
© Enciclopèdia Catalana, S.A. 1997-2006
