Typesetting is hard

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Typesetting is Hard

Well to clarify, for most writers it’s probably not. But my book probably has several considerations that most people don’t for literary formatting:

CJK Font Dependency: I use a lot of NOTO China/Japan/Korea fonts for Yomi’s text
Full Color Unicode Emojis: Because a lot of the book (especially early) occurs digitally, there’s a lot of emoji use.
Fenced formatting: I use this to generate a styled background for Discord conversation in the book to make sure that they stand out

Even in the cases of the above, generating an EPUB is a lot easier than typesetting for a print run. The reasons are basically in the origins of the EPUB. For those unaware, an EPUB is basically just a zip archive with a bunch of formatted HTML. So the context is that a computer is running this in a markup format and the hardware / software does most of the heavy lifting.

The Magic and the Sauce

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote a cosmic horror novel The Fifth Anomaly: A Threshold Chronicle with a companion metalcore album, QR codes linking chapters to tracks, an in-world website, and an AI chatbot based on one of the characters. Here’s how.

Medium - Markdown

First, I’m a software engineer before a writer. This is my first attempt writing a book, so I stuck to a medium I’m most comfortable with. All of the chapters in the book are written as markdown in the following tree format:

Encoding on Multi-Angular Communication Hub

Typesetting is hard

Typesetting is Hard

The Magic and the Sauce

Medium - Markdown