Pilcrow Records

Another Scripter Book Update

musictechscripterbook

Things have been crankin' along here at good ol' Pilcrow. The Scripter book's 2nd draft has been coming along nicely, and some major decisions have been made while going through it. The first decision is that the Scripter book is going to be a complete guide, including all of the topics covered in Apple's documentation, by expanding the book's scope this puts everything anyone ever wanted to know about Scripter into a single place. The other decision is about the book's toolchain to production, and that's what this blog post is all about.

When I first started writing the book, I decided to write it in Apple Pages, simply because it had all the features I needed, and I really didn't need all the power which comes with Word. (And I'm a cheapskate when it comes to just about anything other than audio, and I didn't see any extra utility to be gained with Word for my purposes.) One of the features I was interested in was Pages' ability to output an ePub directly. Ultimately, this is going to be an eBook-only release, so going straight from Pages to ePub has appeal.

As a side note, the illustrations for the book are made in Apple's Keynote with a little help from Acorn by Flying Meat Software. There are a lot of illustrations in the book (and a few tables), one of the features I felt is missing from Apple's documentation, in addition to all the code.

I quickly ran into issues with Pages simply because it is still very much focused on paged documents. Also, this is turning into a rather large technical project, and Pages just isn't designed, on its own or across Apple's suite, to handle that. Pages offers some choices for handling text flow around the images, but since I intend to distribute this as an ePub, I really only needed the text to be above and below the art, and the art to move with the text when anchored into position. This did not work out as planned. I quickly ran into (literal) edge cases where art would not stay anchored in position when it came to the top or bottom of the page, so the references in the text wouldn't line up with the art anymore.

I couldn't have just one long page with all the content flowing seamlessly, which is really what I needed for authoring because that's effectively what an ePub is when in a chapter. I knew I could do this in Word, but, again, that's a lot of money for one feature which would be helpful but not critical to the project.

Another key issue I ran into with Pages is that the ePub output is, frankly, terrible. Even though I had the book divided into chapters, and 4-deep subsections, Pages created an ePub with everything mashed into a single chapter file and no table of contents. Like I said, terrible.

At this point, I knew I had options, and ultimately I turned to LaTeX. LaTeX is really finicky to the non-technical user, but I (clearly) am very much the opposite of that. So, I'm now in the process of moving the book from Pages into LaTeX, and while that's been a bit of a slog, the output has worked out perfectly for my needs. I have one long document with all the text, and any imperfections in layout are minor at best, but largely won't matter once the conversion to ePub happens.

For writing and editing in LaTeX, I am using TexShop, which I highly recommend. I've used it off and on over the years, and its progression to ease-of-use in the LaTeX space has been great to keep up with. So, then the question becomes of how to get the book into ePub format, and for that I will turn to Pandoc, which I've also used in the past to great effect. The output won't be where I ultimately want it to be, but it will be far better than Pages' output.

That's it for this week. I'm still aiming for an EOY 2021 release of the Scripter book, but with the expanded scope to being a complete guide, that may be in jeopardy. Work on the albums has all but stopped at this point, and that's okay. Sometimes I eat the multi-tasking, and sometimes the multi-tasking eats me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯