I wrote a few days ago that I’m going to start making books, and I’ve put some serious hours into getting used to my typesetting program lately. The work has paid off. It’s getting easier to use it all the time. Fortunately, I have some experience with markup languages, so I’m not starting from scratch, but LaTeX is not for the faint of heart. Most people who use it to write books and papers are apparently high level scientists, so it has all sorts of tools for expressing equations and the like, and of course many different “packages” and document classes for producing anything from scientific articles to screenplays. However, despite the fact that it can be a bit of a cranky old program, I’m growing rather fond of it.
So in order to warm up a bit, I decided to put out a few practice documents and see how they came out. First, I typeset Uncle Elmer’s “Employment Game,” and it came out looking quite nice. However, Elmer and I agreed that the content needs a little more tweaking, so we’ll have that ready later.
Today, I spent hours on an old novel I found written by none other than Jacques Futrelle, David Futrelle’s great grandfather. It’s in the public domain now (I pulled it off the Internet), so I figured “why not?” I doubt anyone has bothered to publish a readable version in years, and it turned out to be an interesting project. My rendering of the novel turned out pretty nicely, if I do say so myself. It’s kind of a hybrid ebook/print book, so it could serve either purpose. If I’d chosen to make it strictly one or the other I’d have made a few changes, but not many.
Naturally, I added an introduction that puts the novel in context for our readers. Because aside from the introduction it all came from public domain material, feel free to do what you please with it. Copy it, print it, send it around — it’s yours to use as you wish.
Let me know what you think of the way the ebook looks. I’d be happy to have some feedback.
Here it is:
