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    How Computers Make Books: From graphics rendering, search algorithms, and functional programming to indexing and typesetting
    How Computers Make Books: From graphics rendering, search algorithms, and functional programming to indexing and typesetting
    How Computers Make Books: From graphics rendering, search algorithms, and functional programming to indexing and typesetting
    Ebook360 pages1 hour

    How Computers Make Books: From graphics rendering, search algorithms, and functional programming to indexing and typesetting

    By John Whitington

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    About this ebook

    Learn about computer science by exploring the fascinating journey it took to make this book!

    How Computers Make Books introduces what’s wonderful about computer science by showing how computers have transformed the art of publishing books. Author and publishing software developer John Whitington reveals the elegant computer science solutions invented to solve big publishing challenges.

    In How Computers Make Books you’ll discover:

    • How human descriptions are translated into computer programs
    • How a computer can understand document formatting
    • How a program decides where to print ink on a page
    • Why computer science is so interesting to computer scientists, and why it might interest you
    • …and much more!

    How do computers represent all the different languages and letters used by humans? How do we compress a book’s worth of complex information so it can be transferred in seconds? And what exactly is a computer program? This book answers all those questions by telling the story of how it was created!

    About the technology

    Computers are part of every step in creating a book, from capturing the author’s words as a digital document to controlling how the ink gets onto the paper. How Computers Make Books introduces basic computer science concepts like file formatting, transfer, and storage, computer programming, and task automation by guiding you through the modern digital printing process.

    About the book

    This book takes you on a journey from the plain white page, weaving through typesetting, making gray images from black ink, electronic file formats, and more. It makes computer science come alive as you see how every word, illustration, and page has its own story. You’ll even learn to write your own simple programs and discover hands-on what’s so intoxicating about computer science.

    What's inside

    • How human descriptions are translated into computer programs
    • How a digital computer thinks about print documents
    • How a program decides where to print ink on a page
    • How the history of typesetting shows up in modern books

    About the reader

    For the curious-but-clueless about computer science—and anyone interested in how computers make books!

    About the author

    John Whitington is the founder of a company that builds software for electronic document processing. He has studied and taught Computer Science at Queens’ College, Cambridge.

    Technical editor on this book was Bojan Stojanovic.

    Table of Contents

    1 Putting marks on paper
    2 Letter forms
    3 Storing words
    4 Looking and finding
    5 Typing it in
    6 Saving space
    7 The sums behind the screen
    8 Gray areas
    9 A typeface
    10 Words to paragraphs
    11 Out into the world
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherManning
    Release dateJun 6, 2024
    ISBN9781638354383
    How Computers Make Books: From graphics rendering, search algorithms, and functional programming to indexing and typesetting
    Author

    John Whitington

    John Whitington is the founder of a company which builds software for electronic document processing. He has studied and taught Computer Science at Queens' College, Cambridge and has authored a number of computer science textbooks.

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      Book preview

      How Computers Make Books - John Whitington

      How Computers Make Books

      John Whitington

      MANNING

      SHELTER ISLAND

      For online information and ordering of these and other Manning books, please visit www.manning.com. The publisher offers discounts on these books when ordered in quantity.

      For more information, please contact

      Special Sales Department

      Manning Publications Co.

      20 Baldwin Road

      PO Box 761

      Shelter Island, NY 11964

      Email: [email protected]

      ©2024 by Manning Publications Co. All rights reserved.

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher.

      Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in the book, and Manning Publications was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial caps or all caps.

      ♾ Recognizing the importance of preserving what has been written, it is Manning’s policy to have the books we publish printed on acid-free paper, and we exert our best efforts to that end. Recognizing also our responsibility to conserve the resources of our planet, Manning books are printed on paper that is at least 15 percent recycled and processed without the use of elemental chlorine.

      ISBN: 9781633438675

      contents

      preface

      Acknowledgments

      About this book

      About the author

      About the cover

      1 Putting marks on paper

      1.1 Where things go

      1.2 Placing dots

      1.3 Making lines

      1.4 Building shapes

      1.5 Problems

      1.6 Summary

      2 Letter forms

      2.1 Straight and curved lines

      2.2 Computerized curves

      2.3 Complications

      2.4 Problems

      2.5 Summary

      3 Storing words

      3.1 Ancient methods

      3.2 Numbers in computing

      3.3 An international standard

      3.4 Formatting

      3.5 Modern encoding systems

      3.6 Problems

      3.7 Summary

      4 Looking and finding

      4.1 A simple method

      4.2 Writing a program

      4.3 Speed

      4.4 A faster algorithm

      4.5 Problems

      4.6 Summary

      5 Typing it in

      5.1 Beginnings

      5.2 Layouts

      5.3 Other languages

      5.4 Summary

      6 Saving space

      6.1 Compression

      6.2 Patterns

      6.3 Frequency

      6.4 Compressing images

      6.5 Shades of gray

      6.6 Problems

      6.7 Summary

      7 The sums behind the screen

      7.1 Simple calculations

      7.2 More general computation

      7.3 More operators

      7.4 A larger function

      7.5 A second task

      7.6 Lists

      7.7 Sorting a list

      7.8 Problems

      7.9 Summary

      8 Gray areas

      8.1 Simple thresholding

      8.2 Historical methods

      8.3 Digital halftoning

      8.4 Better dithering

      8.5 Problems

      8.6 Summary

      9 A typeface

      9.1 Introducing Palatino

      9.2 Glyphs and metrics

      9.3 Different sizes and shapes

      9.4 Problems

      9.5 Summary

      10 Words to paragraphs

      10.1 A paragraph of text

      10.2 Hyphenation

      10.3 Paragraphs on a page

      10.4 Before computers

      10.5 Problems

      10.6 Summary

      11 Out into the world

      11.1 Final output for printing

      11.2 eBooks

      11.3 Introducing PDF

      11.4 Building a PDF

      11.5 Conclusion

      11.6 Summary

      Appendix A. Further reading

      A.1 Chapter 1

      A.2 Chapter 2

      A.3 Chapter 3

      A.4 Chapter 4

      A.5 Chapter 5

      A.6 Chapter 6

      A.7 Chapter 7

      A.8 Chapter 8

      A.9 Chapter 9

      A.10 Chapter 10

      A.11 Chapter 11

      Appendix B. Solutions

      B.1 Chapter 1

      B.2 Chapter 2

      B.3 Chapter 3

      B.4 Chapter 4

      B.5 Chapter 6

      B.6 Chapter 7

      B.7 Chapter 8

      B.8 Chapter 9

      B.9 Chapter 10

      Appendix C. Templates

      Appendix D. Palatino Roman glyphs

      index

      preface

      It can be tremendously difficult for an outsider to understand why computer scientists are interested in computer science. It is easy to see the sense of wonder of the astrophysicist or the evolutionary biologist or zoologist. We don’t know too much about the mathematician, but we are in awe anyway. But computer science? Well, we suppose it must have to do with computers at least. Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, wrote the great Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra (1930–2002). That is to say, the computer is our tool for exploring this subject and for building things in its world, but it is not the world itself.

      This book makes no attempt at completeness whatsoever. It is a set of little sketches of the use of computer science to address the problems of book production. By looking from different angles at interesting challenges and pretty solutions, we hope to gain some insight into the essence of the thing.

      I hope that, by the end, you will have some understanding of why these topics interest computer scientists, and perhaps you will find that some of them interest you.

      Acknowledgments

      This book has its origins in knowledge created, found and gathered elsewhere—methods and mechanisms honed over decades or centuries. It could not have been written without the inventions it describes, as you will see.

      At Manning, Ian Hough and Andy Waldron in Acquisitions took a chance on this rather unusual book, helping to shape its contents and structure. My patient development editor, Doug Rudder, shepherded the book through development and writing. Bojan Stovanović, my technical editor, and Benjamin Berg, LaTeX expert, came to the rescue with my frequent typesetting problems. The production team polished the book into what you’re reading today.

      Finally, I’d like to thank the reviewers: Charles Mike Shelton, Christopher Villanueva, Darrin Bishop, Eddy Vluggen, Enric Garcia Torrents, Fatih Ozer, Giampiero Granatella, Howard Bandy, James J. Byleckie, Jaume Lopez, Jeff Neumann, Jens Christian B. Madsen, Jeremy Bryan, Jose Alberto Reyes Quevedo, Kathleen R. Estrada, Lewis Van Winkle, Manu Sareena, Manuel Ciosici, Roberto Hirata Jr., Romain Jouin, Tim Wooldridge, To Tuan Nghia, Tony Dubitsky, and Ubaldo Pescatore, as well as the Manning Early Access Program customers for their time and invaluable comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript. Their suggestions helped make this a better book.

      About this book

      How do we decide where to put ink on a page to draw letters and pictures? How can computers represent all the world’s languages and writing systems? What exactly is a computer program, what and how does it calculate, and how can we build one? Can we compress information to make it easier to store and quicker to transmit? How do newspapers print photographs with gray tones using just black ink and white paper? How are paragraphs laid out automatically on a page and split across multiple pages?

      We answer these questions and more, taking a meandering tour of the art and science of book production from ancient times to the modern day, looking at both the low-level technical details and the overall landscape. You won’t need any prior knowledge of publishing or computer programming to enjoy this book—just a quiet place and a curious mind.

      How this book is organized: A road map

      Chapter 1 introduces the book and explains who it is for and why it was written. We then start our exploration from nothing. We have a plain white page on which to place marks in ink to make letters and pictures. How do we decide where to put the ink? How can we draw a convincing straight line? Using a microscope, we will look at the effect of putting these marks on real paper using different printing techniques.

      Chapter 2 shows how to draw letters from a realistic typeface—letters that are made from curves and not just straight lines. We will see how typeface designers create such beautiful shapes and how we might draw them on the page. A little geometry is involved, but nothing that can’t be done with a pen and paper and a ruler. We fill these shapes to draw letters on the page and deal with some surprising complications.

      Chapter 3 describes how computers and communication equipment deal with human language, rather than just the numbers, which are their native tongue. We see how the world’s languages may be encoded in a standard form and how we can tell the computer to display our text in different ways.

      Chapter 4 introduces some actual computer programming in the context of a method for conducting a search through an existing text to find pertinent words, as we might when constructing an index. We write a real program to search for a word in a given text and look at ways to measure and improve its performance. We see how search engines use these techniques every day.

      Chapter 5 explores how to get a book’s worth of information into a computer. After a historical interlude concerning typewriters and similar devices from the 19th and early 20th centuries, we consider modern methods. Then we look at how the Asian languages can be typed, even those with hundreds of thousands or millions of symbols.

      Chapter 6 deals with compression—that is, making words and images take up less space without losing essential detail. However fast and capacious computers have become, it is still necessary to keep things as small as possible. As a practical example, we consider the method of compression used when sending faxes.

      Chapter 7 introduces more programming but of a slightly different kind. We begin by seeing how computer programs calculate simple sums, following the familiar rules we learn in school. We then build more complicated things involving the processing of lists of items. By the end of the chapter, we will have written a substantive, real program.

      Chapter 8 addresses the problem of reproducing color or grayscale images using just black ink on white paper. How can we do this convincingly and automatically? We look at historical solutions to this problem from medieval times onward and try out some different modern methods for ourselves, comparing the results.

      Chapter 9 looks again at typefaces. We investigate the typeface Palatino and some of its intricacies. We begin to see how letters are laid out next to each other to form a line of words on the page.

      Chapter 10 shows how to format a full book page by describing how lines of letters are combined into paragraphs to build up a block of text. We learn how to split words with hyphens at the end of lines without ugliness, and we look at how this sort of formatting was done before computers.

      Chapter 11 finishes up, showing how our book gets into the hands of the reader, either in print or electronically. Along the way, we learn the details of the PDF standard for document exchange, which combines text, fonts, drawings, and photographs into a single unit.

      liveBook discussion forum

      Purchase of How Computers Make Books includes free access to liveBook, Manning’s online reading platform. Using liveBook’s exclusive discussion features, you can attach comments to the book globally or to specific sections or paragraphs. It’s a snap to make notes for yourself, ask and answer technical questions, and receive help from the author and other users. To access the forum, go to liveBook discussion forum. You can also learn more about Manning’s forums and the rules of conduct at https://livebook.manning.com/discussion.

      Manning’s commitment to our readers is to provide a venue where a meaningful dialogue between individual readers and between readers and the author can take

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