By William Jeffrey Rankin, Thu Oct 31 2024
The Horror of Mistvale Hall was written using Wordperfect. In addition to the MS itself this includes story notes, chronologial and narrative outlines, and other supporting documents. Upon completion the MS was imported into LibreOffice Writer and the paperback and hardcover editions created. Body copy is Times New Roman and the title font is Rakkas, a Google font designed by Zeynep Akay.
Three distinct covers (eBook, paperback, and hardcover) were created in GIMP. Vector elements (typographic and glyphs) were created using Inkscape. Rakkas was again utilized for the title and author text. The subtitle font ("A Jonathan Quint Adventure") is Futura. The back cover copy is Times New Roman.
The eBooks (Kindle and EPUB) were created by importing the MS into Kindle Create. Kindle Previewer was used for initial proofing. The Kindle App (desktop and tablet) was utilized as well in the proofing stage.
Maps and floor plans were created using Inkarnate.
All files were versioned using Apache Subversion.
By William Jeffrey Rankin, Saturday Oct 26 2024
A document consisting, to quote H. P. Lovecraft, "of ideas, images, and quotations hastily jotted down for possible future use in weird fiction." I've used several in my own stories. They are merely starting points to set the imagination working. A few are pulled from Lovecraft's own Commonplace Book.
By William Jeffrey Rankin, Thursday Oct 24 2024
Three Halloween treats for you: favorites from my Carnacki Casebook volumes. All in EPUB format and free!
I hope you enjoy the stories. Happy Halloween!
*Yes, that Thurnley Abbey. If you know, you know.
By William Jeffrey Rankin, Mon Oct 14 2024
Revision 169 of Hua supports PDF generation through Pandoc and the GNU roff (groff) typesetting system. This allows for much better looking print output than is possible through HTML and CSS.
Groff output mode is used in conjunction with article mode:
.\hua.ps1 .\hua.cfg -A '00110' -G
This command outputs two files: the HTML version of the article and a version for use in groff (it's given an .ms extension). To convert this file to PDF, run the following:
pdfroff -ms -mpdfmark -mspdf pandoc-int.html.ms > pandoc-int.html.pdf
The result looks like this (pandoc-int.html.pdf). Here's a more verbose example (old-church-stone.html.pdf). Note that only absolute links work in documents generated this way.
By William Jeffrey Rankin, Thu Sep 26 2024
As of revision 165, Hua has an article mode that enables processing of an individual article. This is useful in instances where an article is in development and requires review. In this mode only the specified article is generated; index, archive, and tagged-with files are not touched. Since only one article is processed, this mode is significantly faster as well.
jeffr@CALLISTO: D:\Documents\wjr-blog $ Measure-Command { ..\Hua\hua.ps1 .\hua.cfg -A '00100' | Out-Default }
...
Seconds : 0
Milliseconds : 375
...
jeffr@CALLISTO: D:\Documents\wjr-blog $ Measure-Command { ..\Hua\hua.ps1 .\hua.cfg | Out-Default }
...
Seconds : 3
Milliseconds : 27
...