Am I the only one here who finds this to be a ridiculous idea? The joy of reading doesn't exactly come from seeing your own name replacing Jane Eyre's.
The idea is to illustrate the power of iterative typesetting in combination with Printing on Demand. I can understand you don't like the idea of seeing yourself show up in every story, but you must like the idea that any manuscript out there, can be automatically designed and typeset and even iteratively be redacted or translated and forked into new editions...
Yeah I'm not very interested in the idea but the tech that is drivng it is super fascinating. Somewhere else in this thread the (owner?) mentioned this was a step on the road towards automated drag and drop publishing which would be AMAZING if they get it right.
As a passionate writer that knows he's not good the current gauntlet to self publishing turned me away despite the fact that I would willing pay $500 in a heartbeat to have a copy of one of my stories on my bookshelf.
That’s exactly what we are building. And self-publishing authors are at the center of our focus.
I hope we will indeed ‘get it right’. I can tell you, it’s not something so trivial as ‘put a fancy GUI on top of LaTeX’. Instead, we are developing a complete typographic design engine, which involves natural language processing, file normalizations, drama parsing, complicated algorithms for type fitting, sectioning, page count quiring, color space conversions, Unicode common locale, multilingual hyphenation, opentype feature development, etc., etc.
12 meters of typographic literature are backing us, while we spend countless late nights in front of our code editor. My printing experience with my Original Heidelberg letterpresses in my garage puts some extra weight on the scale — I just love letters and books, the whole lot of typographic history!
It might assure you, if I tell you I am also methodically working my way through the Chicago Manual of Style, turning those prescriptive rules into working software.
So, do subscribe to our waiting list, and expect your invite coming soon: http://textus.io!
Comments
Am I the only one here who finds this to be a ridiculous idea? The joy of reading doesn't exactly come from seeing your own name replacing Jane Eyre's.
The idea is to illustrate the power of iterative typesetting in combination with Printing on Demand. I can understand you don't like the idea of seeing yourself show up in every story, but you must like the idea that any manuscript out there, can be automatically designed and typeset and even iteratively be redacted or translated and forked into new editions...
THAT is, in fact, very interesting. I'm not sure why you lead with the personalization factor on HN.
Yeah I'm not very interested in the idea but the tech that is drivng it is super fascinating. Somewhere else in this thread the (owner?) mentioned this was a step on the road towards automated drag and drop publishing which would be AMAZING if they get it right.
As a passionate writer that knows he's not good the current gauntlet to self publishing turned me away despite the fact that I would willing pay $500 in a heartbeat to have a copy of one of my stories on my bookshelf.
That’s exactly what we are building. And self-publishing authors are at the center of our focus.
I hope we will indeed ‘get it right’. I can tell you, it’s not something so trivial as ‘put a fancy GUI on top of LaTeX’. Instead, we are developing a complete typographic design engine, which involves natural language processing, file normalizations, drama parsing, complicated algorithms for type fitting, sectioning, page count quiring, color space conversions, Unicode common locale, multilingual hyphenation, opentype feature development, etc., etc.
12 meters of typographic literature are backing us, while we spend countless late nights in front of our code editor. My printing experience with my Original Heidelberg letterpresses in my garage puts some extra weight on the scale — I just love letters and books, the whole lot of typographic history!
It might assure you, if I tell you I am also methodically working my way through the Chicago Manual of Style, turning those prescriptive rules into working software.
So, do subscribe to our waiting list, and expect your invite coming soon: http://textus.io!