alt Hacker NewsI think it’s fascinating to see all the different ways that techfolk who write fiction set up their writing pipelines. Some people go with a bare-bones coding editor like Vim; others use “pro” tools Scrivener. And then there’s the typesetting pipeline. Using troff is pretty out there.
When I started writing fiction, here’s what I came up with. I write in Google Docs because it’s lightweight, works everywhere, and can easily export to Markdown format. From there, I manage the Markdown source in Git and Emacs. For typesetting—I cannot abide crappy word-processor output—I used to use Pandoc to generate LaTeX markup and run LuaLaTeX to produce PDFs. But that took several seconds. Now, I use Typst to go straight from Markdown to PDF files. It’s pretty much instant.
If you want to see what the output looks like, here’s the first chapter of my current project:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Wl4k_rdYGFZp-r5nq864r5CNzD1...
(Notice: This is a typesetting sample, not a writing sample. It’s my W40k-adjacent fanfic, so you have been warned.)
It’s set in 12pt Erewhon, which is an enhanced version of Andrey V. Panov’s Heuristica font family, which extends Robert Slimbach’s Utopia font family. Slimbach is a sublime type designer—he created Minion—and Utopia is one of his early works that is especially spirited.
Replies
Agreed, it seems writers that also code have all kinds of different workflows. I end up using (x)html and doing print stylesheets and rendering pdf for print using weasyprint (works really well, and they have sample stylesheets on their website that are a good starting point).
I like Erewhon. Nice font.
troff is no longer fashionable, and it's not what you want for top-quality typesetting, but I don't think of it as "out there". My non-technical mother was using an HDOS program called TEXT.ABS, which is similar to a limited nroff, to format the articles she wrote in the 01980s. It wasn't as easy to use as something like MacWrite, but it was a lot easier than a typewriter. The text editor she used was called PIE.ABS, and from my point of view, the usability distance from a typewriter to PIE was bigger than from PIE to MacWrite.
She didn't have much choice of fonts on the pre-Graftrax Epson MX-80 she used. I think it was Pica or Elite.
Typesetting is certainly very satisfying, but it's not essential to writing.
Huh. I wrote into vim and made a bunch of .md files, and then just had Claude assemble them into an epub to make my book for Kindle. How did you decide on that size of page for the PDF?
I still use a custom markup language I made for myself [0] because I don't find Markdown flexible enough, Latex's syntax is disgusting, and neither is particularly consistent.
> techfolk who write fiction set up their writing pipelines
And perhaps infinitely procrastinating on the actual writing itself...