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| 1 | +[[colophon]] |
| 2 | +[colophon] |
| 3 | +== Appendix: Colophon |
| 4 | + |
| 5 | +Almost all of the software that I have used in the creation of this book are <<floss,FLOSS>>. |
| 6 | + |
| 7 | +=== Birth of the Book |
| 8 | + |
| 9 | +In the first draft of this book, I had used Red Hat 9.0 Linux as the foundation of my setup and in |
| 10 | +the sixth draft, I used Fedora Core 3 Linux as the basis of my setup. |
| 11 | + |
| 12 | +Initially, I was using KWord to write the book (as explained in the <<history_lesson,history |
| 13 | +lesson>> in the preface). |
| 14 | + |
| 15 | +=== Teenage Years |
| 16 | + |
| 17 | +Later, I switched to DocBook XML using Kate but I found it too tedious. So, I switched to |
| 18 | +OpenOffice which was just excellent with the level of control it provided for formatting as well as |
| 19 | +the PDF generation, but it produced very sloppy HTML from the document. |
| 20 | + |
| 21 | +Finally, I discovered XEmacs and I rewrote the book from scratch in DocBook XML (again) after I |
| 22 | +decided that this format was the long term solution. |
| 23 | + |
| 24 | +In the sixth draft, I decided to use Quanta+ to do all the editing. The standard XSL stylesheets |
| 25 | +that came with Fedora Core 3 Linux were being used. However, I had written a CSS document to give |
| 26 | +color and style to the HTML pages. I had also written a crude lexical analyzer, in Python of |
| 27 | +course, which automatically provides syntax highlighting to all the program listings. |
| 28 | + |
| 29 | +For the seventh draft, I'm using http://www.mediawiki.org[MediaWiki] as the basis of my setup. I |
| 30 | +used to edit everything online and the readers can directly read/edit/discuss within the wiki |
| 31 | +website, but I ended up spending more time fighting spam than writing. |
| 32 | + |
| 33 | +For the eight draft, I used http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/vim[Vim], |
| 34 | +http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html[Pandoc], and Mac OS X. |
| 35 | + |
| 36 | +=== Now |
| 37 | + |
| 38 | +For the ninth draft, I switched to http://asciidoctor.org/docs/what-is-asciidoc/[AsciiDoc format] |
| 39 | +and used http://www.masteringemacs.org/articles/2013/03/11/whats-new-emacs-24-3/[Emacs 24.3], |
| 40 | +https://github.com/chriskempson/tomorrow-theme[tomorrow theme], |
| 41 | +https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/styleguide/products/firefox-os/typeface/#download-primary[Fira Mono |
| 42 | +font] and https://github.com/sensorflo/adoc-mode/wiki[adoc-mode] to write. |
| 43 | + |
| 44 | +=== About the Author |
| 45 | + |
| 46 | +See http://swaroopch.com/about/ |
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