TNHY is changing its typesetting tool from Ingram Spark’s book building tool to Overleaf’s implementation of LaTeX. Why does this matter? Let us count the ways:
1) LaTeX is open-source, community-supported software. Nobody owns it; it is “safe” to use forever.
2) TeX, the core of LaTeX, was first released in 1978 by Dr. Donald Kunth, a Stanford computer science professor. It has been under continuous improvement ever since.
3) LaTeX, released in 1984, provided a simplified way to use TeX. LaTeX became the standard tool for typesetting academic journals in statistics, mathematics, physics, and chemistry.
4) Dr. Conlon, the founder of TNHY, is a statistician, and began using TeX in 1979, and LaTeX in 1984. He has been using these tools ever since.
5) Because of its history and success, LaTeX is the book-publishing industry standard for typesetting.
6) Because it is the standard, there is an enormous community of support for LaTeX.
and,
7) Overleaf, a company of Digital Science, is a web-based platform for using LaTeX to produce beautiful documents, and is used throughout the academic and book-publishing businesses. Dr. Conlon began using Overleaf in 2013.
Oh my, this all makes such perfect sense. Why did TNHY ever use anything else?
Three reasons: 1) TNHY formed around Dr. Conlon’s first book, printed by Ingram Spark. Independent authors recommended using the Ingram Spark book-building tool (and they had never used LaTeX). Using the book-building tool appeared to be “built-in” to the Ingram Spark book printing business (it wasn’t); 2) Ingram Spark came with our choice of twelve attractive built-in book designs — fonts, heading sizes, spacing, front matter. Reproducing all this in LaTeX appeared difficult (it wasn’t); and 3) It wasn’t clear if LaTeX could produce a suitable eBook to be used by Amazon, Ingram Spark, Kobe, and Apple (it could). TNHY quickly showed that it could produce a beautiful eBook using LaTeX. We now produce eBooks and typeset-quality PDFs from a common LaTeX source.
The new process, using LaTeX to produce TNHY print and electronic books, gets us all the benefits of LaTeX, while using a tool we know and love.
Honestly, we should have thought of this from the beginning.