Posted by shai on Jul 06, 2018; 6:04am
URL: https://discuss.asciidoctor.org/Am-I-missing-something-big-about-book-production-tp6365p6413.html

Thanks!

I ran into it when looking into the various options and mostly skimmed it as the path of HTML to PDF seems a bit painful to me. I'm also looking at things that might not be easily expressed via styling. E.g. a sentence that gets pushed to the next page...

I've already made huge progress on the book using the approach I outlined with Sketch. The starting point was the almost default output of asciidoctor-pdf. All the other design elements are drawn in Sketch see these:

https://www.codenameone.com/files/uber-book/create-an-uberclone-in-7-days-Chapter-1-preview.pdf

https://www.codenameone.com/files/uber-book/create-an-uberclone-in-7-days-Chapter-2-preview.pdf

Notice I used bleed to get chapter numbers and elements all the way to the edge of the page so you would be able to see the specific chapter by looking at the side of the book. Also notice that I replaced all the images with sketch diagrams since I used sketch to draw the diagrams to begin with. That means that all the graphics in the PDF is vector graphics and should be very crisp on print. I tried using the SVG approach but it had some issues...

A huge advantage here is the level of control, I can draw anything anywhere and adapt the diagram font/size with pixel perfect accuracy.

The downsides are:

- It's a LOT of work.

- Syntax highlighting doesn't format well into the PDF and gets jumbled in sketch so I need to move stuff around a lot

- Fonts don't match 100% so the code highlights e.g. `this is code` is shifted by one point down. This is true to one degree or other for every markup.

- I can't add/remove pages or even shift content too much as I don't want to break the index/ToC

- Links get broken, for me this isn't a big deal. I'll use the mobi/epub version for digital. This is only for print

I have ±430 pages and this is a pain to do. But I think I can push out something that will look as good (or even better) than a Manning book interior!

I'll try to write up an article about this process when I'm done and show some before/after images.