Bookmaking tools

One of the areas in the project space is bookmaking tools: tools that help with making either print books or ebooks. What I’ve worked on in that area (and some of these are still in progress or in the future):

• Press — low-level typesetting (PDF compiler)
• Ink — higher-level typesetting
• Curves — programmatic type design
• Typlate — type design templates
• md2epub/Caxton — ebook compiler
• epubdiff — ebook differ
• Fledge — text processing shell
• Storybook — writing tool (covered under the productivity tools, yes, but I feel it fits in here)

Creativity tools

The next area, somewhat related, is creativity tools: tools for making art, music, etc. I do realize that there’s a bit of overlap between the two areas — art can be used in books, for example. This is not a rigorous taxonomy.

What I’ve worked on:

• Trill — music composition REPL
• Grain — command-line tool for texturing art

While I haven’t done much in this area so far, the intersection of software and art has been calling to me more lately. I expect creativity tools to become much more of a focus for me, probably even more so than the bookmaking tools.

Human-Computer Interaction

Last but not least, HCI. My master’s thesis is in this area, and much of my other work also touches on it in limited ways. (What I mean by that, I think, is that with projects like Trill, Curves, and Press, the parts that have most interested me are the interfaces. Also, those interfaces have been textual in these particular cases, but I’m also interested in other kinds of UIs.) So I plan to start building more proofs of concept and interface experiments — like the spatial interface ideas I mentioned several weeks ago.

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You twiddle with the numbers till you get proportions you like, then print out the PDF and start drawing:

Technical note: I’m using jsPDF to generate the PDF in-browser. In fact, there’s no server-side code at all. It’s amazing what you can do with JavaScript these days.

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