We’re profiling the title on our Catalogue page, with links to the various sales pages, but if you’re in the US we highly recommend you order this title via The Japan Shop, which is an excellent source for Japanese educational material, located in Florida.

A new master with correct page margins (2:1 ratio inner:outer margins, rather than the draft 1:1 we had  used) has been generated and sent off for proof printing, and hopefully we’ll be able to inform you of its successful proofing and we can start taking your orders!

If we’re happy with what the machines did to the book, expect a post on publication going into full swing within a few days!

First off, for reasons that are not entirely understood, applications like Word and Writer tend to get the typesetting dimensions of pages wrong. If you write a document with page margins set to some value, and this happens to be your default setting, then rest assured that our default settings will be different and your content may end up on different pages. Effectively, we’re looking at two different documents, even though the information in them is the same.

Second, fonts. If you write your material with fancy section headers in a cute serif font with lots of curls and frills, and we do not have that same font installed on our systems, then with applications such as Word or Writer a kind of “fallback” font will be used instead. Since this is something that the applications do without any kind of notice, again we would have two completely different documents.

Third, and this one’s a biggy, if you use a WYSIWYG application you are essentially saying “I do not care about typesetting precision, I just want to write a text”. This is fine as long as you really just want to write a text, such as a letter or a short essay or just a little story you are working on, but when it comes to writing a book this is simply not good enough: it’s going to need to be typeset, and if you’re using Word or Writer or many other WYSIWYG applications this will basically mean that we’ll either ask you to convert your document to PDF so that we’ll know what you see is what we’ll see, or we’ll have to take over and do all the styling in collaboration with you.

PDF format is, in fact, great. It lets you embed your fonts so that we’ll see what you intended us to see, and rigidly describes every page’s dimensions explicitly so it always looks the same, regardless of who opens it. And if someone tries to open it with a PDF viewer that doesn’t support some of the features used in it, the better PDF viewers will go “I do not support this file”, which is great because it means that instead of seeing something potentially wrong, we simply don’t get to see it until we have something that can assure us that what we’re seeing is right.

But you can’t really edit PDF files. That is to say, you can edit them a little (replacing pages, adding annotations, etc) but you cannot edit the text in a PDF file, because a PDF file is technically a graphical document: it is in essence a rather elaborate vector image that only knows that “element Z sits on position x/y of the page”. That is very useful if the document is genuinely done, but not so useful when modifications need to be done, such as making the document fitting a particular publishing template.

So what is the alternative? You may have heard this term before but the alternative is TeX (pronounced ‘tech’, with the ‘ch’ being the same as in the Scottish ‘loch’ from ‘loch ness’), more specifically LaTeX, and if we’re honest even more specifically XeLaTeX.

You use TeX when you want to typeset text, not just write it. It is a typesetting programming language, in which the vast majority of your text is just that. Text. However, in addition to this you are required to explicitly mark every font change you want to make, what style the page headings should be, and a number of other things that you don’t realise are important until you want to make a little change to your document that your WYSIWYG application just won’t allow. In addition, TeX always spaces out your text so that there is an option number of words/characters on each line. Open any book on your bookshelf and count the number of words and characters per line on a page – good chance they’ll all average to around 13 words and 66 characters per line. Typesetting is a science as well as an art, and it turns out that these numbers are optimal when it comes to printed material. Word or Writer, on the other hand, do not care about this in the slightest.

TeX, and its far more userfriendly extension LaTeX let you specify everything that you need to properly typeset a document in a way that makes the result either identical on all computers it’s used on, or throws up errors to inform you that the computer you’re using it on is missing things that are required by your document, or is using an incompatible version of TeX. Trust us when we say that this is great – not only is it easy to edit a TeX file, because it’s just plain text, but it even guarantees that if we’re missing something you thought we would have, TeX will go “you need to sort this out before we can do delicious book-generating business”.

To make things even better, there is XeLaTeX, which again makes things a bit easier by offering several things that you might be used to from your WYSIWYG editor, such as selecting fonts based on their font name (TeX itself was from the 70′s, when “computer fonts” were a rather revolutionary idea), using a mix of  languages with wildly different characters (such as English, Hebrew and Japanese), and generally makes life a lot easier than regular LaTeX.

Does this mean we will only publish material written in TeX? No. TeX is hard to master because you are forced to be precise. This is a good thing, because being precise lets you be a perfectionist, and it’s a bad thing because you were writing a book, not learning a typesetting programming language. However, if you do take the time to learn LaTeX/XeLaTeX while you’re writing your book (you need writing breaks, right?) you might just find that it kicks your WYSIWYG application’s ass several times over when it comes to the product it generates for you.

So, a long story short: use whatever tool you think works for you, as long as you end up with something that will look the same on our side as it does on yours. And if you used TeX, you’ll find us showering you with praise =)