Posted by shai on Jun 13, 2018; 7:23pm
URL: https://discuss.asciidoctor.org/Am-I-missing-something-big-about-book-production-tp6365p6369.html

Thanks!

I've had the first edition of the O'Reilly book years ago and browsed a bit through the new one. I know XSLT but it's a serious pain to go through the maze of weird XSL:FO settings. Thanks for the Docbook For Writers suggestion, I looked through the table of contents briefly and it seems to be more focused on the docbook aspects and not as much on the print/typesetting aspects which is what I'm trying to understand. I honestly don't know anything about typesetting and just started reading about it when I saw how badly my manuscript looks next to a professionally typeset book.

E.g. I've wrecked my head against just removing the "Chapter" prefix that gets pushed into the chapter headings, I see it in the localization code but it's really hard to follow this through guesswork. So my question is really: do publishers do that or do they export to a specific tool for typesetting and do the final process there?

Is there some tool for typesetting?  Do they export to InDesign using some tool or something else?

E.g. in this book from Manning (who use asciidoc/asciidoctor) we have a few elements that I find really hard to replicate. See the chapter heading with the underline, overly and missing "Chapter" prefix.  Notice the block below which is highlighted as a special case too:



Also look at the position of the numbering next to the paragraph. The numbering is effectively in the margin gutter and not in the body of the text allowing the title to align with the paragraph which looks amazing! I've seen examples where quotation marks etc. are placed in that area to keep alignment properly and glyph spacing is increased in a sentence to make justified text look better (reduce the spaces between words for justify).

(I'll post this in the next reply as it won't let me attach two images to one post)

Manning also has images where text flows around the images and their source code listings have the callouts embedded into the code. I saw an RFE for that and that feature is supported in docbook using LineAnnotations.

This looks like something that's done by a human being with design sensibilities, I'm assuming that person has some visual tools that take the file after processing and work with that. But being ignorant in this field I have no idea and don't even know the keywords to type into Google. I've spent the past couple of weeks googling various typesetting and other such keywords to no avail. I went through Atlas docs and still feel I'm missing something big.