Introduction

This book documents my journey into LaTeX. I have run into limitations as I create Robo Teaches Programming and moving to LaTeX fixes all of them. So, I am taking a brief break from writing that series while I explore the world of LaTeX.

I started writing my books in a word processor before moving to Leanpub and Markdown. I love using Microsoft Word, and I love Leanpub. Technical and academic books, though, benefit from LaTeX and, now that I have switched to it, I don't see myself using anything but structured documents for my technical and academic writing.

We start at a macro level and then dive into some details. This book showcases tools that authors can use when writing technical and academic books. We even get to build some of our own! This book also can serve as a primer on LaTeX, as we learn it gradually throughout the text - just enough to produce a good-looking book while providing a lot of external references that serve as wonderful rabbit holes.

There are many other LaTeX resources out there. I am writing this book because this style of publishing - technical, multimedia self-publishing - seems not to have a single point of reference, and my goal is to provide just that.

Join me on this journey! It is one that I have wanted to take for a long time. I am very excited to finally have an excuse to travel this path.

Current status

The outline of the book is, more or less, complete, which has allowed me to write this introduction! :-) I have finished a sample book, which will be used for the examples in the book. I have scripts written in PowerShell and bash to build PDFs using two methods. I have a basic workflow for building web and ePub versions using two additional tools. I now need to finish those workflows so that I can start writing the book.

You can follow the progress of the code at the GitHub repo that supports this book (link).