Last time, I talked a little about how I used Pandoc to create a paperback book. Well, since I wrote that, I’ve not only posted the thing, but I have a copy of my own. Seriously. That’s a strange feeling, as I wrote about on Patreon.
Anyway, I promised I’d talk about how I did it, so that’s what I’ll do. First off, we’ll look at Memoir, one of the greatest inventions in the history of computer-aided authorship.
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Memoir is a LaTeX class; essentially, it’s a software package that gives you a framework for creating beautiful books with less painstaking effort than you would expect. (Not none, mind you. If you don’t know what you’re doing—I can’t say I do—then it can be…unwieldy.)
It’s not perfect, and the documentation is lacking in some respects (the package’s author actively refuses to tell you how to do some things that upset his aesthetic sensibilities), but it’s far superior to anything you’d get out of a word processor. Oh, and it’s like code, too, which is great for logical, left-brain types like me.
So, let’s assume you know how to use LaTeX and include classes and all that, because this isn’t a tutorial. Instead, I’ll talk about what I did to beat this beast into shape.
First off, we’ve got the class options. Like most LaTeX packages, Memoir is customizable in the extreme. It’s not meant only for books; you can do a journal article with it, or a thesis, or just about anything that could appear in print. So it has to be ready for all those different printing formats. Want to make everything print only on one side of the page? You can do that. Multicolumn output, like in a newspaper? Sure, why not?
The list goes on, but I only need a few options. “Real” books are single-column and double-sided, so I’ll be using the appropriate class options, onecolumn and twosided. Books in English start on the right-hand page, so add in openright. But wait! Since most books use these options anyway, Memoir simply makes them the default, so I don’t have to do anything! (Now, if you’re making manga or something, you might need to use openleft instead, but that’s the exception, not the rule.)
Besides those, I only need to specify two other options. One is ebook, which sets the page to a nice 6″ x 9″—exactly the same as Amazon’s default paperback size. If you want something else, it can get…nontrivial, but let’s stick to the basics. Oh, and I want american, because I am one; this changes some of the typography rules, though I’ll confess I don’t know which ones.
Set it up
The remainder of the LaTeX “coding” is mostly a series of markup commands, which work a bit like HTML tags. The primary “content” ones are \frontmatter, \mainmatter, and \backmatter, which are common to Memoir and other packages; they tell the system where in the book you are. A preface, for instance, is in the front matter, and you can configure things so it gets its pages numbered in Roman numerals. Pretty much the usual, really, and not Memoir-specific.
For typography, some of the things I did include:
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Changing margins. Amazon is finicky when it comes to these. It actually rejected my original design, because Memoir’s 0.5″ is apparently less than their 0.5″. So I’m using 0.75″ on the left and right for Before I Wake, and I suspect Nocturne will need something even bigger on the inside edge. Top and bottom get 1″ each, which seems comfortable.
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Adding subtitle support. I don’t need this for either of the two novels I mentioned, but I might later on. Pandoc passes the subtitle part of its metadata through to LaTeX, but Memoir doesn’t support it. So I fixed that.
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Creating a new title page. This was fun, for varying values of “fun”. Mostly, I just needed something functional. Then I had to do it again, to make the “half-title” page that professional books have.
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Fixed headers and footers. This was mostly just configuration: page numbers in the outer corner of the header, author and title alternately in the middle, and footers left blank. Not too bad.
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Changing the chapter style. Here’s where I almost gave up. By default, Pandoc tells LaTeX to create numbered chapters. Well, I did that myself. Rather than go back and change that (it would screw up the EPUB creation), I told Memoir to ignore the pre-made numbering completely. This is especially important when I get to Nocturne, because it has a prologue and epilogue. Having it put “Chapter 1: Prologue” would just be stupid.
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Add blank pages. Now, you might be wondering about this one. Trust me, it’s for a good cause. Memoir is smart enough to add blank pages to make a chapter start on the right side (that
openrightthing I mentioned earlier), but it won’t do that at the end of the book, or if you go and manually make a title page, like I did. Oh, and if you’re doing a print book, remember that it ends on the left page.
The whole thing was almost a hundred lines of code, including the text for, e.g., the copyright and dedication pages. All in all, it took about three or four hours of work, but I really only have to do it once. Next time around, I just tweak a few values here and there, and that’s it. Automation. It’ll eventually take everybody’s job.
Coming up
So that’s enough to get something that looks like a book, but I’m still not done. Next up, you’ll get to see the bane of my existence: Pandoc filters. And then I’ll throw in a little bit about some interesting LaTeX packages I use, because I need Code posts. See you then!