Harry Potter and the Methods Of Rationality
https://github.com/rjl20/hpmor
Maintainer: Reuben Thomas rrt@sc3d.org
A LaTeX version of the popular didactic fan-fiction by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which can make a PDF e-book (one file) or printable books (either one or six volumes; the latter option is more practical to bind). There are also dust jackets for the printable volumes.
TeXLive 2015 or later and git are required to build the book. (Note: the book must be built from a git checkout.)
Note: the Omake Files chapters (11 and 64) have been moved to the end of the single-file PDF. Those chapter numbers are omitted in the text, so chapter 10 is followed by chapter 12, for example. Similarly, the chapter disclaimers and epigraphs are removed to an appendix. In the six-volume PDFs, all chapters are renumbered to start from 1 at the start of a book, and there are no appendices.
Files
hpmor.tex
- the main filehp-format.tex
- mostly sets up memoirhp-markup.tex
- logical markup commands used in the textchapters/
- one file per chapter, included fromhpmor.tex
and the individual volumeshpmor-N.tex
.spelling-list.txt
- a list of words used to spell-check the book.fonts/
- various fonts usedlatexmkrc
- configures latexmk to run LaTeX to build the PDFs.GNUMakefile
- contains targets to make a Zip of the PDFs and release them to GitHub. (Mostly of interest to project maintainers.)make all
does the same aslatexmk
(see below), which may be useful for editor integration (e.g. Emacs).
Building the book(s)
latexmk
: Build all PDFs. (If in doubt, just run this command and do something else for twenty minutes!)make all
: Build a Zip of the PDFs.latexmk hpmor
: Build the one-volume PDFhpmor.pdf
latexmk hpmor-N
: Build one of the six individual volumeshpmor-1.pdf
tohpmor-6.pdf
.latexmk hpmor-dust-jacket-N
: produce the dust jacket for Volume N,hpmor-dust-jacket-N.pdf
. Note that this requires the corresponding volume,hpmor-N.pdf
, to have been built first.latexmk -c
: Remove files produced by building (except PDFs).latexmk -C
: Remove files produced by building (including PDFs).
By default, the dust jackets assume 80gsm plain paper (this affects the
thickness of the book and hence the size of the dust jacket). This can be
configured in hp-paper-type.tex
; see papers.tex
for a list of papers.
The exact sizes of dust jackets may vary; the current parameters were taken
from a commercial printer. They can be adjusted in hp-dust-jacket.tex
as
desired.
Note that the back dust-flap is left for you to add your own text; edit
hp-dust-jacket.tex
and search for “PUT YOUR BACK DUST-FLAP TEXT HERE!”.
Make sure you remove the percent sign %
at the start of the line, or your
text will not be printed. (This is a safety feature to make sure that if you
don’t change the text, the placeholder will not appear; instead, you’ll just
get a blank back flap.)
When producing a book with a dust jacket, you may well not want the front cover as well. To suppress the front cover, use the following incantation:
latexmk -norc -e '$options="nocover"' -r latexmkrc -g hpmor-1
Of course, you can replace hpmor-1
with any other volume, or leave it
out to generate all PDFs with no cover.
To build a single chapter, from the chapters
directory use the command:
latexmk -norc -e '$chapter=N' -r ../latexmkrc -g hpmor-chapter-NNN
Similarly, to build a single appendix or other non-chapter section, from the top directory use the command:
latexmk -norc -e '$chapterfile=FILENAME' -r latexmkrc -g FILENAME
Contributing
Contributions are most welcome. These fall into three main categories:
- Textual corrections (where the text differs from the online original unintentionally).
- Textual improvements: fixing straight-up errors in the English (or deeper, the sense, story etc.), or “Britfixing”, i.e. replacing non-British usages.
- Design and typography. Improvements to both the PDF and print versions of the books are encouraged. See the GitHub bug-tracker for known issues; also, search the sources for “FIXME”.
For textual changes other than simple typo or language fixes, please familiarise yourself with the style guide (below).
The preferred way to submit any improvement is as a GitHub pull request. Textual corrections can also be submitted as issues in the issue tracker, or by email to the maintainer.
For the GitHub URL, and email address of the maintainer, see above.
Style guide
Spelling
When spell-checking, use spelling-list.txt
instead of your personal
dictionary, so the results are less dependent on your setup. (The system
dictionary can still of course vary from one setup to another.)
Words that are standard English or part of the Harry Potter universe, or are
otherwise of “global” relevance should be added to spelling-list.txt
.
Exclamations (“Eeeehhhh”) and other one-offs should be added to the per-file
word lists. (There’s obviously something of a grey area in the middle, e.g.
one-off references to various real and fictional people.)
Emacs users benefit from a .dir-locals.el
that automatically sets up spelling-list.txt
as the personal dictionary for all HPMOR files.
Chapter headings
Chapters that aren’t part of a continuing series look like this:
\chapter{The Fundamental Attribution Error}
Chapters that are part of a continuing series look like one of these:
\partchapter{Working in Groups}{I}
\namedpartchapter{Self-Actualization}{SA}{VIII}{The Sacred and the Mundane}
The first is pretty simple; it’s just the title of the chapter followed by which part it is.
The second looks like the title of the chapter, then the abbreviation for the title of the chapter, then the part, then the title of the part.
First sentences
Normally, a chapter starts like this:
\lettrine{P}{adma} Patil had finished
That creates the large initial letter.
If the first paragraph of the chapter is all italics, though, it looks like this:
\begin{em}\lettrine{T}{he} red jet of fire took Hannah full in the
[...]
blazing green spirals brought down their foe’s Shield Charm.\par\end{em}
Sections
\section{Final Aftermath:}
Disclaimers and Epigraphs
These have been removed to an appendix, hp-epigraphs.tex
.
Miscellaneous
There are some other things relating to newspaper headlines and such; check the chapters they appear in for the appropriate markup.
Markup
These are macros defined in hp-markup.tex
. You should glance through that
file to see what commands are available, and use them instead of direct
markup; for example \shout
rather than \textsc
.