Make Ready.
or,
A Printer's Manual for the Age of Mechanical Compositors
or,
How One Person and Several Tireless Machines May Keep a Small Press Honest
or,
Why Every Page Deserves a Witness That Could Have Said No
Table of Editions
| Chapter edition | the book as a small website, one chapter per page |
| Print edition | 6 by 9 inches, typeset by LuaLaTeX, suitable for paper |
| Circulating edition | EPUB, for readers of every size |
| Single-leaf edition | the whole book in one self-contained HTML file |
| Manuscript edition | plain Markdown, agreeable to machines and their agents |
| Telegraphic edition | plain text at eighty columns, for terminals |
| Office edition | DOCX, for reviewers armed with tracked changes |
| Chapter edition, boxed | the reading site, zipped for carrying |
| Source edition | the manuscript and its configuration, archived |
| Manuscript edition | plain Markdown, agreeable to machines and their agents |
How This Book Was Built
Every edition above is compiled from the same plain Markdown source by Pandoc and LuaLaTeX, in one command, on every push. No format is edited by hand, and nothing is stated in two places.
Each build must survive a gauntlet before it may call itself a book: structural checks on the source, an editorial audit for synthetic prose and forbidden punctuation, a jargon linter with a maintained watchlist, and a rendered-page inspection that verifies trim size, embedded fonts, expected text, and that every page contains ink. The artifacts here were attached by the same continuous integration that refused earlier, worse versions.
The source lives in a public build system; versions and their contents are recorded in the changelog, and finished releases live on the releases page.