Thursday, January 28, 2016

Figures in my new mini-book

In my new mini-book I used a new (to me) fun process.  The process I am referring to as agile writing, is based on the best low-pain tools I could find.   It would not be unfair to say I wrote a minimum viable book (MVB).   The tools are mainly google docs, limnu drawings, and screen captures of vim with auto-coloring.   The code was super-easy because vim auto-coloring works really well IMO:



Note that google docs has a nice crop interface so you don't need to screen capture precisely.

The white-boarding in limnu took me a little getting used to, but works very well.   Here's an example of a screenshot from limnu pasted into google docs:

I asked Dave Hart and Grue Debry for tips on how to do figures, and what is funny is that their advice mainly boiled down to "do what you do on a real whiteboard".   That advice may seem content-free but it's not; I did change my mentality that it was "fast and loose" and I needed to not be too uptight.    I know this from using real white boards, but somehow I wasn't in that mode with a tablet.   But once I just pretended it was a whiteboard and not a traditional computer drawing program I got much better results.   They wrote up the advice at their site.

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