Over the past year or so I've worked on a number of projects, one of which is a publishing company, New Leaf Publishings, the aim of which is to reprint old works in their original language and without translation, commentary or long-winded introduction.
This is the first of a series of articles about this project, and will go over some of the things that work as well as some problems that have yet to be solved.
How it all works
New Leaf Publishings is a website that connects the Stripe payment processor with print-on-demand services to automate the sale, printing and shipping of books. The content of these books is already freely available online in some form or another, but is reformated and has modern notation to help with pronunciation.
LaTeX book and covers templates
When it comes to the books themselves, I started out with a LaTeX book template I found on Overleaf (which has since been deleted) but have since edited it and moved to a Vim + pdflatex + zathura workflow.
The template was originally meant for novels, and other than a few minor changes to the layout of the book itself, the only major change that I made was to use a split verse format, as is generally used for Anglo-Saxon poetry.
For the cover, I used another template from Overleaf, that I changed quite significantly (at least visually). Originally, I thought to quickly get a version of the book printed and had only a simple, dark grey cover with a light grey, almost white title. However for whatever reason, the print-on-demand service I was using "couldn't handle" large areas of dark colours on the cover and I decided to make a new cover, the one currently on the website, to which I also added a blurb.
After giving it some more thought I would rather give it another shot and create a cover I'm actully proud of before putting the book up for sale, and have, therefore, removed the payment link for the time being.
Cover issues
When it comes to the new cover, there are a few issues that I have yet to resolve. The first of these is creating a transparent, coloured text background, like the one on this webpage, the second is dealing with overlaping images, and the third and final one has to do with the title-font.
Print-service
When it comes to the printing of the book itself, there is still the underlying issue of whether or not the cover will come out looking as intended. If the print-on-demand service does not resolve this, I will simply have to use a different service that doesn't have this problem in the first place.
This obviously entails the added work of having to connect the payment service to this new print service to calculate the correct shipping and total costs for the customer.
Anglo-Saxon skill issues
Since these books are to be printed in their original language, this raises the obvious issue of correct spelling which is actually for the most part resolved since these books are already available in their original languages online. The only issue is that of adding the correct pronunciation guides to the spelling which is also mostly solved by others but generally only for the most popular of these works, such as Beowulf.
Mail spamfilter
There is really only one issue when it comes to email, and that is some problem with the spam filter that blocks all incoming mail but should be easily resolvable.