Wires & Books
Committing to the bit: Designing and typesetting paraTactician’s “The Vienna Game”
- Completion Date
- July 2023
- Author
- paraTactician
- Work
- The Vienna Game
- Fandom
- Homestuck
- Binding
- PoD hardcover (A5)
- Fonts
- Body text in Spectral; various design elements in Tomorrow, Noto, Drum N Bass, Expletus Sans, and Alternian
- Software
- LuaLaTeX (memoir class for interior, bookcover for cover)
I don’t remember a lot of what I was doing in 2013, but thanks to file change history, I know that was when I started the process of typesetting The Vienna Game. 2013 to 2014 were the peak of my time in Homestuck fandom and I had ambitions for so many things, most of which didn’t get done (but such is life). When I started preparing The Vienna Game for print, I knew I wanted to do a better job of making it “properly booklike” than I’d previously done.
The Vienna Game is a cyberpunk adventure focusing on Sollux Captor and Terezi Pyrope, as well as Rose Lalonde and Dave Strider. Various other characters from Homestuck appear in supporting roles. The story is transparently a pastiche of William Gibson’s Neuromancer – a hacker and a warrior on a quest to free an AI from durance vile – but it benefits from the subsequent decades of development in the field of neon-lit hacking excursions.
Æsthetic arrangements
I did very little work on the typesetting until October 2014, when I apparently started thinking about epigraph formatting. And then there was a much larger break; the next commit in the repository is from February 2021, at which point one of the main gimmicks had been created: the chapter numbering scheme:
Chapter numbers appear on the contents page, at the start of each chapter, and in the recto page headings. Cleanly formatting them like this required slightly different code for each place, but this is the price we pay for cleverness.
\usepackage{fmtcount}
\copypagestyle{straylight}{plain}
\makeatletter
\createmark{chapter}{right}{nonumber}{}{}
\makeevenhead{straylight}{\readoutfont\itshape\@title}{}{}
\makeoddhead{straylight}{}{}{\readoutfont\itshape\padzeroes[4]\binary{chapter} \rightmark}
\makeevenfoot{straylight}{}{\readoutfont\thepage}{}
\makeoddfoot{straylight}{}{\readoutfont\thepage}{}
\makeatother
\makechapterstyle{beenary}{%
\setlength{\beforechapskip}{40pt}
\setlength{\midchapskip}{20pt}
\setlength{\afterchapskip}{40pt}
\renewcommand*{\printchaptername}{}
\renewcommand*{\chapternamenum}{}
\renewcommand*{\chaptitlefont}{\readoutfont\Huge\itshape\centering}
\renewcommand*{\chapnumfont}{\chaptitlefont}
\renewcommand*{\printchapternum}{\chapnumfont \padzeroes[4]\binary{chapter}}
}
\chapterstyle{beenary}
\setcounter{chapter}{-1}% To begin at 0
\let\oldchapternumberline\chapternumberline
\renewcommand{\chapternumberline}[1]{%
\oldchapternumberline{\padzeroes[4]\binarynum{#1}}}
\setlength{\cftchapternumwidth}{3.5 em}
I’m still pretty proud of that bit, tbh.
The change history makes clear that in 2021 I still had no idea of basic things like “the shape of the textblock” and “margins: what shall they be?” I was focusing my attention instead on the cover design.
By late 2021, I’d settled into the notion of taking my design cues from various editions of Neuromancer, of which there have been some good and some less good examples.
My process at this stage consisted of long periods of ignoring the task, punctuated by sudden glimpses of inspiration. In the end, I pulled a title page design from the Ace Books first edition and a dust jacket design from the Gollancz first hardcover edition.
The final push
Having sorted out the major graphic design elements, I returned the project to dormancy for a couple more years, in accordance with my established practice. In the spring of 2023 I began to seriously consider what it would take to finish the job and, on July 4th, 2023, in a commit titled shit lets be gutenberg, I turned my attention to elemental concerns: the page and textblock.
The page is a piece of paper. It is also a visible and tangible proportion, silently sounding the thoroughbass of the book. On it lies the textblock, which must answer to the page. The two together – page and textblock – produce an antiphonal geometry. That geometry alone can bond the reader to the book. Or conversely, it can put the reader to sleep, or put the reader’s nerves on edge, or drive the reader away.
So says Robert Bringhurst, and I’m inclined to think he’s on to something here. For page size, I had really only a few choices; my PoD provider offers six possible page dimensions in its hardcover-with-dust-jacket system, half of which I could eliminate immediately as impractically large. I was left with “Digest” (5.5 x 8.5", or half a sheet of US letter paper), A5, and “US Trade” (6 x 9"). There are good uses for all three of these sizes, but A5, as an ISO page size, is based on a ratio of the square root of two, and for a story with so much focus on Sollux Captor, I couldn’t pass that up.
Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style suggests a page layout for use with ISO pages; the textblock’s proportions are derived from the golden ratio, which appears in many places in the natural world (though not so many places as some writers would have you believe). One such natural occurance is in the reproductive patterns of honeybees. And of course bees and honey are a recurring motif for Sollux.
The memoir class provides a convenience command to produce this page layout: \semiisopage. In the end, I found that setting the optional spine margin parameter to a tenth of the page width produced a result I liked, with a textblock sized approximately 103mm by 168mm, on a page size of 148mm by 210 mm, and the margins sorted themselves out automatically.
In a punctual manner
The punctuation in The Vienna Game, as posted on AO3, is a touch sloppy. This is a claim which may gain me enemies! “But pT teaches at St John’s in Oxford,” they may say, “whereas you, Mx Rose, are a dropout from a significantly less prestigious institution!” Nevertheless, I was required to enforce consistency upon the text. For example, the punctuation mark used in a contraction is always an apostrophe, which for technical reasons is often represented by a right single quotation mark. In no instance should the apostrophe be turned into an left single quotation mark, even if the apostrophe appears at the beginning of the contracted word, as in 'til.
I friggin' hate apostrophes
The apostrophe is a complicated beast.
Now, glyphs are all well and good, but computers operate on the basis of numbers, as any fule kno, and so we must have our Unicode codepoints. In their infinite wisdom, the Unicode committee have given us both U+0027 apostrophe and U+02BC modifier letter apostrophe. Which codepoint do they recommend using for the English apostrophe (as seen in contractions and possessives)? Why, U+2019 right single quotation mark, of course.
(We have inherited U+0027, a codepoint with ambiguous purpose, from the sages of bygone days, while U+02BC seems to be used mainly as a combining character to form the n-apostrophe, a character used in Afrikaans. Ted Clancy has written a reasonably persuasive article proposing to use U+02BC for the English apostrophe, but this suggestion does not seem likely to be taken up by the general public.)
Modifier letters are funny things; they’re mostly letters which modify other letters, but sometimes are letters in their own right.
Modifier letters, in the sense used in the Unicode Standard, are letters or symbols that are typically written adjacent to other letters and which modify their usage in some way. They are not formally combining marks and do not graphically combine with the base letter that they modify. They are base characters in their own right. The sense in which they modify other letters is more a matter of their semantics in usage; they often tend to function as if they were diacritics, indicating a change in pronunciation of a letter, or otherwise distinguishing a letter’s use. Typically this diacritic modification applies to the character preceding the modifier letter, but modifier letters may sometimes modify a following character. Occasionally a modifier letter may simply stand alone representing its own sound.
Modifier letters are commonly used in technical phonetic transcriptional systems, where they augment the use of combining marks to make phonetic distinctions. Some of them have been adapted into regular language orthographies as well. For example,
U+02BBmodifier letter turned comma is used to represent the ‘okina (glottal stop) in the orthography for Hawaiian.
I am persuaded that the English apostrophe is more letter-like than not; it serves to replace letters, and unlike most punctuation symbols, should be considered part of the word in which it appears. However, I was hesitant to adopt U+02BC as the apostrophe character. I worried that its obscurity might lead to issues at some point in the printing process and I was running short on time. So I edited the font instead.
I defined a new OpenType feature, “Nice Apostrophe”, using the pre-defined (but unused in this font) ss07 feature tag. When this feature is active, the codepoint U+0027 is rendered with the glyph for U+2019, which means that the basic apostrophe character (') renders with a glyph identical to the right single quotation mark (’). I may write a post about how to modify fonts in the future… Anyway, having defined that feature, I turned it on for the entire book and carefully changed all apostrophe-like punctuation to the correct character.
Dashing hither and yon
Typographers have recourse to a variety of dash characters, but the main ones which interest me here are em-dashes and en-dashes. An em-dash is one em (a unit equal to the point size of the font in use) wide; an en-dash is smaller (sometimes but not always half an em in width). Common usage of these dashes varies depending on country. In the US, we often see the em-dash used to set off a clause, as in “His neural architecture, they'd said—speaking slowly, like he wouldn't fucking know what it meant—had been irreversibly damaged.” In the UK, it is more common to see an en-dash, padded with spaces, used for this purpose: “His neural architecture, they'd said – speaking slowly, like he wouldn't fucking know what it meant – had been irreversibly damaged.” This is all very fine, except where it intersects with dialogue:
“Remember,” she said more loudly, “when he is locked into the network, Mr Captor will be completely defenceless. If something goes wrong, do whatever is required to keep him alive! If you do not – ” she inclined her head slightly – “I will find you. I am very good at finding people.”
pT has (in apparent conformance to a preferred style at Oxford) repeatedly set one dash within the quotation marks for spoken dialogue and one dash without. This liminal usage sets my teeth a-grinding and I decided not to stand for it.
“Remember,” she said more loudly, “when he is locked into the network, Mr Captor will be completely defenceless. If something goes wrong, do whatever is required to keep him alive! If you do not” – she inclined her head slightly – “I will find you. I am very good at finding people.”
pT also uses the spaced en-dash to indicate a cut-off line of dialogue or narration. In most cases, I changed this to an unspaced em-dash, as I find a space before a closing quotation mark to be distracting. Thus “Hold on – ” became “Hold on—”.
When used for cuts in narration, however, the spaced en-dash is perfectly fine, except that in a few cases I was obliged to mark the space as non-breaking, as the en-dash should never appear on a line by itself.
Creating the dust jacket
As previously mentioned, I’d decided to imitate the dust jacket from the first hardcover edition of Neuromancer (1984, from Gollancz).
I sampled the yellow from this cover and decided it could be approximated with #F3D92C; Sollux’s yellow is #A1A100, and after some experimenting I decided that #E3CE23 (a shade that is 20% Sollux and 80% Gollancz) would be suitable. I sampled the other colors (red, blue, near-black) to use as-is for their respective elements.
I was able to mimic most of the design elements from the cover, except that The Vienna Game has a much shorter summary. I figured a centered block would work well enough for that.
The Alternian text is done in, appropriately, Alternian. However, the font provided there has each glyph rotated 180°, for use with unsophisticated layout engines. I, on the other hand, use a sophisticated layout engine, such that I can set text into a box of fixed width, then rotate that box arbitrarily before placing it on the page. So I fired up my font editor again (by which I mean a Python script using the fontTools library) and unrotated the glyphs so that they’d be properly rotated after being set into lines.
I haven’t an ISBN, but I do have my own identifier system, so I created a QR code leading to the metadata page for this book and stuck that on the back cover instead.
One (1) printed book
And then I sent it off to be printed. And then I waited. And, eventually, my patience was rewarded.
It looks very much like a book (which is the point). The dust jacket is reasonably matte, and fits nicely onto the book. Within, the pages are perhaps a little bit too smooth (in a way that is reminiscent of copy paper), but it doesn't feel cheap.
However, it is still very much a print-on-demand book. The spine has been perfect-bound and then the textblock was glued into the cover. This book will not be as durable as a properly signature-sewn book, I fear.
Overall, I find this to be a satisfying result. Were I to do it over again, I would probably try to find a Greek font which matched Spectral a little more closely, instead of using Noto Serif for the epigraph page. And I would probably have liked finishing it back when Homestuck was still a relatively-live fandom. But do I have regrets? No, I do not.