Friday, 7/26/2019
Didn’t feel like running; and anyway I used to have a habit of taking a longish walk on Fridays instead, so decided to have breakfast in the dining room and then walk to the Tasso street house to check progress.
Of which there has been none. The house is exactly like it was on Monday when I looked at it with Chuck. So I sent a text to Chuck suggesting that, as it was almost the weekend, he should try to stimulate the painter today, ok? And he didn’t reply, which probably means that, as on the prior couple of weekends, he is off playing the piano at some resort on the Russian River and out of cell phone coverage. Which is annoying. Both his absence on weekends and the lack of painting progress.
Chatted with neighbor Gloria, then walked up California Ave. and had coffee at the little invisible place in an alley, forget its name. And on home. (Over 10k steps for the day, yay me.)
Back home I worked on the book. This was mostly a matter of continuing to struggle with the LeanPub platform. The book is written in their flavor of Markdown, called Markua. Except they have been developing Markua for over two years now and keep not finishing the little corner features like poetry (i.e., a block of text in which the input spaces and newlines are preserved). I have 6 places in the book where I quote verse; they were defined with the Markua poetry markup as described in its spec, but it isn’t implemented so, when I complained in the user forum the developer suggested I use Code markup instead. Code markup (pre-formatted text in HTML terms) does preserve user newlines and indents, but it also uses by default, a monospaced font. But one can change that.
So I converted the poems to code markup and set the “Code” font to be the same as the body font, and regenerated. And discovered that code markup also doesn’t notice the markup for italics, so the italicized words in a poem aren’t, and it doesn’t recognize footnote references, so where I had a footnote reference at the end of a verse, as one should, it didn’t work. And in any case, the three places I had poems in the end-notes file (because I put poems in end-notes, ok?), this caused the PDF generation to end with an error.
Posted these issues to the user forum and the developer wrote back apologetically, yes, well, that’s how Code should work, the special characters you use for italics and footnote refs are meaningful in code so we can’t translate them. And the PDF generation errors? We’ll work on that.
So now I converted all the poems to block-quote markup. Blockquote markup does respect newlines, but loses indentations. But at least, it works in end-notes. Now I could generate a good PDF that, aside from poems not having indented lines, looks fine.
So I “published” a new version of the Leanpub book, eight purchasers will have had emails notifying them. But anyway, that version of the book now benefits from the dozens of little edits and tweaks I’ve made in the past weeks.
Then I generated a print-ready PDF and uploaded it to Kindle Direct. Kindle was happy with it, couldn’t find any problems, the preview looked good, so I clicked the “publish” button there. Sometime in the next 72 hours I’ll get an email saying the book is published on Amazon, and I can order a few author’s copies. One for my shelf, one for the C.H. library.
Took it easy for the rest of the afternoon, then went to supper, as invited, with Patti, Craig, Diane, and Karen and David. Very pleasant sitting with a bunch of chatty people, I hardly contributed anything.
Codgerville 