My first two books were written online using Pressbooks in a browser. A change in the company’s pricing model prompted me to migrate another edition of the second book to LaTeX. Many enjoyable hours were spent searching online for how to implement everything from the basics to special effects. After a year and a half a nearly finished book suddenly congealed.

Here’s what I’m using: Fedora’s TeX Live stack, Emacs (with AUCTeX and the memoir class), Evince, and the Citations flatpak, all on a GNOME desktop. The cover of the first book was done professionally by a friend. For the second book (first and second editions) I’ve used the GNU Image Manipulation Program.

For print on demand, Lulu.com. The company was founded by Bob Young, who (among other achievements) rejuvenated a local football team, coincidentally my dad’s (for nearly 80 years and counting). Lulu was one of the options recommended by Adam Hyde at the end of the Mallard book sprint hosted by Google. Our book didn’t get printed in time to take home, so  I uploaded it to Lulu and ordered a few copies with great results. My second book is also on Amazon’s KDP under another ISBN; I’m debating whether to do that again.

Does this all need to be done from GNOME? For me, yes. The short answer came from Richard Schwarting on the occasion of our Boston Summit road trip: “GNOME makes me happy.”

The long answer…
In my career working as a CAD designer in engineering, I’ve used various products by Autodesk (among others). I lived through the AutoCAD-MicroStation war of the 1990s on the side of MicroStation (using AutoCAD when necessary). MicroStation brought elegance to the battle, basing their PC and UNIX ports on their revolutionary new Mac interface. They produced a student version for Linux. After Windows 95 the war was over and mediocrity won.

Our first home computer was an SGI Indy, purchased right in the middle of that CAD war. Having experienced MicroStation on IRIX I can say it’s like running GNOME on a PC: elegant if not exquisite compared to the alternative.

For ten years I was the IT guy at a small engineering company. While carrying out my insidious plan of installing Linux servers and routers, I was able to indulge certain pastimes, building and testing XEmacs (formerly Lucid Emacs) and fledgling GNOME on Debian unstable/experimental. Through the SGI Linux effort I got to meet online acquaintances from Sweden, Mexico, and Germany in person at Ottawa Linux Symposium and Debconf .

At the peak of my IT endeavours, I was reading email in Evolution from OpenXchange Server on SuSE Enterprise Server while serving a Windows workstation network with Samba. When we were acquired by a much larger company, my Linux servers met with expedient demise as we were absorbed into their global Windows Server network. The IT department was regionalized and I was promoted back into the engineering side of things. It was after that I encountered the docs team.

These days I’m compelled to keep Windows in a Box on my GNOME desktop in order to run Autodesk software. It’s not unusual for me to grind my teeth while I’m working. A month ago a surprise hiatus in my day job was announced, giving me time to enjoy GNOME, finish the book, and write a blog post.

So yes, it has to be GNOME.

In 2004 I used LaTeX in XEmacs to write a magazine article that was ultimately published in the UK. This week, for old times’ sake, I installed XEmacs (no longer packaged for Fedora) on my desktop. This requires an EPEL 8 package on CentOS 9 in Boxes. It can be seen in the screenshot. The syntax highlighting is real but LaTeX-mode isn’t quite operational yet.

After World War II, Jack Kirby and his partner Joe Simon began their first foray into the genre of crime comics. (Kirby would return to the topic briefly in 1954 and 1971.) Beginning in 1947 and tailing into 1951, the stories appeared largely in Headline Comics and Justice Traps the Guilty for Crestwood’s Prize Publications. In 2011, Titan Books published a selection of these stories in hardcover, but sixty percent of the stories from this time period aren’t included in the book, and at least 20 stories have never been reprinted. Unlike Simon & Kirby’s much more prolific romance offerings, all of the comics in question are in the public domain and available on Digital Comic Museum and Comic Book Plus sites, thanks to multiple volunteers. I set about creating my own collection of scanned pages.

When the downloaded .cbz files are extracted into a folder, the resulting image files have names like scan00.jpg, scan01.jpg, etc. In GNOME Files, selecting all the files for a given issue and pressing F2 brings up the batch rename dialogue.

Selecting the Find and replace text option, I replace “scan” with the book title and issue number, with “p” as a separator for the page number.

When all the stories have been added, the pages will be sorted by title and issue number. To enable sorting chronologically, a four- or six-digit prefix can be used to specify the cover date, in this case “4706” for June 1947. To add this I press F2 on the same selected files and use the Rename using a template option.

Using the Jack Kirby Checklist as a guideline, and discarding (very few) stories for insufficient Kirby content, my project yielded a folder containing 633 pages including covers.

Jack Kirby (1917-1994) was a pioneer in American comic books. He grew up on the Lower East Side of New York City (where he encountered real and aspiring gangsters first hand) and fought in northeastern France in 1944 as an infantryman in Patton’s Third Army. As a partner in Simon and Kirby and the manager of the S&K studio, Kirby defined the word cartoonist—he generally wrote, penciled, inked, and occasionally coloured his own stories.

Jack Kirby photo property of the Kirby Estate. Used with permission.