Workshop: Book Publishing with the Wolfram Language

Thank you, everyone, for joining this session. Our topic is on book publishing with the Wolfram language. So if that's not the talk you thought you were in, feel free to drop off. But yes, I'm going to talk a little bit about our team here at Wolfram, which is the Wolfram Media Group, and talk about some options for publishing any materials that you'd like to publish about using Wolfram language. So we will jump right into it here. So, yes, today we're going to cover a little bit about different options for publishing your books about Wolfram language use. And then at the end, we'll jump into kind of an interactive demonstration on our publishing tool set. If you want to follow along, you can, and I'll try to leave time to do that. But if it's going too quick and you'd rather just do it on your own later, like I said, you can download the presentation and it should be pretty easy to follow along, even without me speaking to. So, first, I want to tell you a little bit about our team. My name is Paige Viarolo. I'm the managing editor for Wolfram Media. So if you have any questions about publishing, either with Wolfram Media, or, as I'm going to talk about in a little bit, publishing a book about Wolfram language with another publisher, your question will probably end up with me eventually, if you want it to get there quicker. The email to contact is publishingolfram.com and we'll get all your questions answered. Todd Akers is our production specialist. He does page layouts for print and also for Kindle and different. Different web books as well. And then Trey in Jansen, he's actually here today on the call. He's going to be monitoring the Q and A for you guys. He's the publishing assistant and he kind of just helps out with everything we're doing within the publishing operations here at Wolfram. So you might be wondering, what are those operations? What do we do when it comes to publishing? Wolfram Media is a small press that's part of Wolfram research. And we focusing. We focus on publishing books that are about how to use Wolfram technology or using Wolfram technology in different settings. This is a little screenshot from our website. You see the link there? You're welcome to visit that and check out all our books. But yes, we have published quite a few this year. This little image collage down here shows all the books that we've published. Six of these were from this year. So it was a pretty big year for us. And we're excited about that. And then the other thing that we at Wolframed Media do that I already hinted at is we support authors as they work with other publishers when they're publishing books about using our technology. So let me go to our next slide here. I do want to take a couple minutes to brag on our recent releases, or a couple of them from this year. Our first one that I have here on the screen is Seth Chandler's. I don't know if he was able to join today's call or not, but Seth Chandler is a longtime Wolfram language user and he's just published this book with us about. It's called Query Getting Information from Data with the Wolfram Language. And. And it's all about data science and how to do that with Wolfram. So this is an example. I'll kind of point out the different types of publishing we do. This one, I'll say, is our traditional publishing, where we did all the editing in house. Our design team designed the lovely cover you see there. And we did print a traditional print run and distribute it kind of through your traditional channels and also places like Amazon, things like that. We also have this available in notebooks that can be downloaded from an online version, which is linked from our website, if you want to check that out. The next book I have here was our most popular book this year, came out back in March when everyone was asking exactly this question. What is Chat GPD doing and why does it work? So this was Steven's book. No surprise why it was popular this year, but I'll point out a couple of interesting publishing features about it. We started this one out as a Print on Demand title, which basically means we don't invest in thousands of books sitting in our warehouse. We just upload a file to a printer partner, and then as people order it, they print more copies. So for this book, the reason we did that was timeline. We wanted to get it out really fast, and we didn't have time to work with our traditional publisher. But I point this out because in some of your cases, if you're working on a book on a very niche topic, perhaps Print on Demand can be really useful too, because we don't have to make that financial investment in a large print run. We can just kind of print copies as people order them, which is helpful for books that have smaller audiences as well. We also did a third edition of EIWL this year. If you've been around Wolfram for any length of time, you might have encountered this book. It's a great resource for people just starting out. And the third edition, we brought it up to date with version 13.1 of Wolfram language. And it included some new features like audio and video processing. But just all of the chapters that are in the book were updated to reflect some of the newer features in the technology. So that was cool. We also published the second volume of Gerald Thomas's A Field Theory of Games. I want to call attention to this one because in this case, so far we've just published Publish this book as a Kindle format. We're finding that that's a good way to reach his audience. So just an example of how every book is different and, you know, sometimes just Kindle makes sense and that's something we're able to do as well. This book is called Creative Data Analytics. It's by Faye do, her son Davis Moe and Kelvin Michio. This book I want to point out because it follows a different publishing model that I'm going to get into talking about a little later on. But it is a zip file of notebooks sold on our web store. So instead of being a traditional paper book or even a Kindle book, it's a little bit more interactive than that. And the other big difference is the authors were kind of responsible for preparing this all on their own. So it does have a Wolfram Media ISBN and we do sell it on our store, but this is kind of their own entirely. They're responsible for editing and everything like that. So I will talk about that as we move into kind of our publishing options. I do also want to highlight 20 years of a new kind of science. Last year, during conference time, I was talking about our NKS anniversary box set. And at the time, this book's included in that set. That was the only way to get the book. The box set did have a fairly high price point. So we are excited that this year, you know, now you can access just this book on its own at a lower price point. If you're interested in checking it out, I would recommend it. One of my favorite parts of this book is it has a gallery of art at the end, art that's inspired by cellular automata and a new kind of science. So that was really fun to work on. And you know, something that as a, as a tech publisher, I don't get to experience all that often. So it was fun to work on the art portion of that book too. We got a little sneak peek of some of our upcoming projects here. So Stephen is working on a book about predicting eclipses, which we're Hoping to have out in time for the total solar eclipse that's going to be visible from parts of North America this April. So we are excited to work on that book. We're also just starting talks of working on a fourth edition of Hands On Start to Wolfram Mathematica and Programming with the Wolfram language. That's been a really popular book for us. That's helped a lot of people get a foothold in kind of using our technology. So we're excited for that as well. Another upcoming project that we have is the Wolfram E textbook series. This is going to be an outlet for our internal experts, our R and D developers, to books about, you know, the technology that they built. So we're really excited about that. We're planning to have these books available as zip files of notebooks, as print on Demand books, and also as Kindle books. And there's going to be a range of topics, as you can imagine, within Wolfram. Even just this conference is a good representation of all the different things people are using our technology to do. So we're starting out with one on calculus. We have another one in the pipeline on signal systems and signal processing. But yes, there's, there's hopefully going to be many more where those two came from. Okay. As promised, I'm now going to transition into talking about different opportunities for, for authors or for anyone who's planning on or thinking about publishing a book about Wolfram Language or Wolfram Technologies. So I always say we have three options and you can see them here on the screen. On the screen. I'll kind of go through each one. But yeah, there's, there's kind of the full service traditional publishing, there's supporting you while you work with another publisher. And there is that. Either add it as a zip file of notebooks to our web store like Calvin and Facebook that I showed. So we'll kind of dive into those a little more. The traditional publishing, with us acting as your full service publisher, is the first one I'm going to discuss. For that option, you do need to submit a proposal to us. We would then take several weeks to review it. You can see here on the screen what materials are required for that proposal. And if we decide it's a good fit for us to move forward with publishing it, then we'd negotiate a contract with you. And from there we would do all your designing. We would work with you with editing. We do page layouts. We might order a full print run. We might decide maybe we'll do this as ebook only. But we would kind of be involved in all of those decisions. This is the method that Seth Chandler's book used. So we are doing this with external authors, even though Steven does monopolize a lot of our time. The next method is supporting you while you work with another publisher. So you see the logos from several well known publishers here on the screen. All of these publishers have published at least one, but in most cases several books about using Wolfram technology. And we're very supportive of that. We don't feel competitive about that. We're happy for you to publish with, with any of these great publishers. And if you are working with one of these publishers on a book about Wolfram, we're able to offer you some support. And you can see that here on the screen. We can support you by helping with formatting. We can. If you're having an issue with some of your code and you don't know how to fix it, I'm not the one to help you. I am not a programmer. But if you email me, I'll get you in touch with a developer who worked in that area and we'll get that sorted out for your book. We're able to, we've helped a couple authors publish supplementary content. Maybe they want to like put a URL in their book that readers can go to to find some of the code that they're talking about. And we can help you, you know, maybe publish something on Wolfram Cloud that would help with that. And then we do help just a little bit with the marketing. Mostly that would be on you and on the publisher you're working with. But we're able to add your book to the Wolfram Book site, which is linked here if you want to check that out later. But that's a site where we have not just our Wolfram Media books that we publish, but we try to collect all of the books published about Wolfram language. And if you notice one missing, please do just let us know. Email publishingolfrum.com we try to catch them all, but you know, books come out all the time, so sometimes we miss one. And then we also try to do at least one blog post a year on the Wolfram blog where we point people towards some interesting new books about Wolfram. So that's another option. We might be able to help you a little bit with just getting a few more eyes on your book by including it in our blog. There are some benefits of working with another publisher. One would be that our support everything I talked about on the last slide is no additional cost to you beyond just your regular Mathematica subscription license. Whatever style you're using Mathematica in, you are obviously free to negotiate your contract and your royalties with your publisher. We're going to stay out of that completely. That's all up to you. And then you do get the benefit. This last point is kind of versus. If you chose to self publish, you get the benefit of your chosen publishers, editorial and distribution services. That is really important. I always say that every single book could use an editor. You know, if you're thinking of writing a book on Wolfram language, it's probably because you're an expert in some ports portion of it, which is great, but that doesn't mean that you couldn't use an editor. So I would always recommend, even if you are self publishing, hire a freelance editor. But that is a nice thing about about working with a publisher. The last publishing method I want to discuss is adding ebooks to the web store, which is what I talked about with Calvin and Fay's book, Creative Data Analytics. Again. So basically in this option you prepare your book as notebooks. It's usually like one chapter per notebook, but you know, I'm going to show you a couple different styles of how this has been done in the past. So you prepare it, you get it all ready. You work with your own freelance editor, you send it into us, we add a registration screen. We have a great developer named Andy Hunt who does a signing situation which basically like locks down your book so that you can't have users making edits right in the book, though they will still be able to copy out any code and paste it in their own notebook and work with it all they want. So this is kind of our poor man's drm. So basically a user has to buy the book on our store. They get a registration code, they put it in and then they can access it. If they don't have the code, it looks kind of all jumbled up. It's certainly not foolproof for a sophisticated coder, but that is what we're able to apply. And we can also give you one of our ISBNS if we go for this publishing method. And that kind of just gives your book a little legitimacy and helps make it easier to list in some different places. So why would you choose to do your book like this? Here's a couple benefits for just the idea of doing it as a zip file of notebooks. I have one slide here about benefits for you as the author and we'll also talk about benefits for your readers. So for you as the author, the main benefits are control. You have full control over how it looks. You know, basically anything that you can program into your notebook is fair game. That's all up to you. My second point here is you have control over the timeline of your project. Those traditionally published books do tend to take a long time, especially if we have a couple other things in our pipeline. As you saw at the beginning of the presentation, our team is pretty small. So yeah, the traditionally published books take longer. This format where you're creating the zip yourself is like much more dependent on just how fast you want to work on it. And then you also have the ability to choose your own list price. So, you know, you might know this is kind of a textbook thing. People are expecting to pay that kind of price. Or maybe you're like, people only want to pay 10 bucks for this and that's what I want to list it for. So that's kind of all up to you. Then there's obvious benefits for your audience, mostly just that it's much more interactive than your traditional paper book or even a Kindle book, which is a little bit more static as well. So this is great. If you want to have dynamic content, you can have things like links, you can have custom pop up features. And I've even seen an author set it up so you can submit your homework problems to be checked right through the book, which was super cool. Again, don't ask me to code that could not do it. But you know, that's an option for authors who, who are able to set that up. And then like I mentioned before, a big part of these books is teaching users how to use the code. So if you have this zip file of ebooks, you know, a user could copy that cell right out of your book, put it right next to it in their own notebook, manipulate it, change the code, rerun the code and learn from it that way, which is really cool. And then obviously an ebook can be produced more cost effectively than a print book. So that might help you, you know, if, if it does again have a smaller niche audience, this is a way to still be able to publish it without being too concerned about the, the cost of publishing a printed book. So as promised, I'll show a couple examples of what these zip files of notebooks could look like. This is kind of, I'd say like the most basic option, which is still super nice. It just, um, every chapter in this book is its own notebook and they're all in a zip together. They all have this nice docked cell at the Top with these navigation features. So you can, you know, click a dropdown. There's like a little hamburger menu behind this. This is just a screenshot, but you can see all of the chapters and you can navigate to whichever one you want. And they'd open kind of in the same window with the same branding at the top with that Doc Cell. So that's a nice way to do it. This is another example. This is Bruce Schneider's book on statistics and research design. So he actually has his book set up so that when you launch it, it launches all three of these different windows at once, kind of sized nicely on your screen. You'll see there's. There's like a complete. A homework module button down, down here. So he's the one that I was mentioning earlier, has that kind of all built in where you can actually submit things through the book. And, you know, he has features for viewing graphics and things like that. So it really is kind of up to the author how they'd want to lay out their book if you, if you go for this format. And then the next natural step, I guess, might be like, if we're thinking about making books more interactive, you might also want a course to go with your book. So if you are considering that there's a few options, this one kind of has like, the book here on the right and video, and there's, you know, a scratch pad at the bottom. And there's also versions where it's more of just like a playlist of videos that go with your book. And if you're interested in doing this, I'd very much recommend that you reach out to our Wolfram you team. They handle all the courses, but they're always looking for new, new content as well. So kind of in the same way that I'm pitching creating books, they could help you create a video course if it's something that they decide they'd like to take on, too. And their email is wolfram uwolfram.com hopefully you'll be able to get these slides as well at the end of the session. Okay, next I'm going to hop into our Wolfram Book Tools demonstration. So this is the part that can be interactive, and I'll try to leave a little time for someone to follow along if they want to do it right now. But like I said, if you'd rather just listen to the presentation now and go back and try it on your own later or anything like that, feel free as well. So Wolfram Book Tools is a palette that one of our developers Jay has created. And it basically takes a lot of the guesswork out of how should I format my book? And allows you to get right into writing. So I would recommend again, either right now or later on, go to wolfram-media.com you'll find our Author Resources tab from that top navigation menu. And then there's a big orange button that you can't miss. It says, Download Wolfram Book Tools. So that's where you need to go to get this palette that we're going to be discussing. And if you did this presentation last year and downloaded it, or if you've just been playing with it on your own, there are new updates within the last week or so that we prepared specifically in advance of the conference. So I'd recommend that you get the latest version. Once you click that orange button, you're going to download an installer. It looks like this. You just click the one and only button that is there, the Install Update button, and then you're going to be instructed to restart your Mathematica to complete the installation. So, yeah, if you do want to follow along, I'll try to leave a little time for that portion. But while anyone might be doing that, we can look at what it will look like when you do load it. So once you restart your Mathematica, you will want to go and find palettes from your top menu. This is what it looks like on Mac. And you'll see in your list of palettes, you'll now see Wolfram Book Tools, which probably wasn't there before. You can click that guy and you'll get something that looks like what I have here on the right side of my screen. So that's the palette we're going to be talking about today. Whenever someone's brand new to the palette, I always suggest that they start with the template. So, second button down on the palette says New Template. If you go ahead and click that, you're going to open up a notebook that looks like this screenshot here. And like I said, the whole purpose of this palette is to kind of take the guesswork out of it. So what you can see from this template is, you know, you wouldn't have to decide how should I format my section and how should I format my code? And we have this nice little piece of code text here. Like, there's styles designed for all of that for you and just kind of ready to use. So the template does a good job of showing you an example of what that could look like. Go to our next slide here. Okay, so within that template, you'll see things like these items listed here. I'd like to highlight. Code text. Code text is something we encourage all of our authors to use. It's basically like in the template here, this one liner in the sans serif font that quickly describes what the code says. Doing that's pretty helpful to users if they were kind of skimming back through maybe something they already read just to see like, hey, what is this code for? What is it doing? We always recommend that this is only one line in length, so keep it really brief. If you have more explanation to do, do that in your regular text like this up above here. So, yes, there's lots of styles of cells that are available. This palette comes with its own style sheet, which is basically what we're talking about using here. So we recommend that you use these styles for your book subsection section. You know, you've got your code text style, we've got things like numbered list examples in an item format. And of course, you know, you might find that you want something in your book that we don't have here, or you want yours to look different. Totally fine. You can obviously create your own styles, but this allows you to kind of jump right in without having to do all that work yourself. You'll also see in the template that there are some sections that you might put as end matter at the end of your chapters. Vocabulary exercises, question and answer, tech notes, and more to explore. If this is looking really familiar to you, it's because it's very much based on Steven's elementary intro style sheet. So, yeah, these end sections might be useful to readers, depending on what you'd like to write a book about. Maybe they're not. Maybe you decide, I'm going to use vocab, but Q& A doesn't really apply to me, and that's totally fine. You can pick and choose, Like I said, very closely based on Steven's elementary intro style sheet. So you can check that out if you want to see. You know the template is. But if you want to see it with some actual content in there instead of just sample content, you can take a look at how Steven used it. The online version of eiwl, which you could find just by searching it on Google, is a great example. The print version uses the same same style sheet, so you can check that out too. Okay, so hopefully, if you do want to follow along, you've now been able to download and open up your palette. The first thing that I'll have you do is set the draft chapter directory so in the gray text towards the bottom of the palette, you'll see that option, I have it circled here in red. Go ahead and click that. If you had already started writing a book and you had notebooks saved in a specific folder, you could pick that folder. If this was going to be, you know, you're starting right now, starting fresh, you could just, you know, create a folder and choose that as your directory that you'd save your chapters in. We do recommend that each chapter be its own notebook. So the idea is that this directory would be filled up with your chapters. You're going to have to go ahead and click yes to give Mathematica access to the directory. That should be fine. The next thing I'd have you do is click that very top button on the palette, the new chapter button, and then you'll get a little dialogue that has you enter the chapter number. If in this example you were just starting your book, you probably just leave that as chapter one and hit ok. Obviously, if you're working on a later chapter, you change that number to whatever chapter number you're working on. Then you're going to get a mostly blank notebook that looks like this. So it has the number of your chapter, whatever you put in up here, it has the word chapter, which the idea there is that you replace that with the name of your chapter and it has, you know, the start of a text cell. So you would, you'd replace that with the beginnings of whatever your first paragraph is going to be. The next thing that's always important to do is to save your chapters. So there's a button a little further down the palette, it's a gray button. You can click Save Chapter and that's just going to open up your Finder window or your Windows equivalent of your Finder window, and you'll be able to give your chapter a name and save it within that directory that we already chose. From that point on, you can just use your regular command S or file save to keep saving your files. And do recommend that you save often. Okay, so next we have every Wolfram Book Tools style notebook has this document cell at the top that we're going to start exploring a little bit. So the notebook that you just created, if you did click that new chapter button, will have one of these. And the first thing we're going to talk about is the Insert drop down menu here on the left side. If you click that, you'll see a whole list of styles of cells that you can apply. I'm not going to go through each One, obviously you can see them there and use them on your own. But I will go through a couple of them that are maybe not as self explanatory, explanatory code text we already discussed. But just as an example of how to insert one, you know, you just put your horizontal insertion bar wherever you want that cell to insert. So in this case we have that here at the end of the sample text that I had already written. If you click that code text button within the insert dropdown, you'll get this cell with the four X's that you can type over with your code text. You'll see that that is a sans serif style text. So it's a little different style than the regular text. And that's intentional so that people can tell like, hey, this is the quick summary of what's going on with the code. That's basically that one liner that we talked about already for adding code. You'll notice that there's no input or output in the insert dropdown menu. That's because just like in your default style notebook, input is the default style style cell. So if you just place your horizontal bar under whatever cell you want to add your code under, you can just start typing. You don't have to insert any special style cell. And that will be your input cell. And then just like any other type of notebook, if you do shift enter, you're going to get that code to evaluate and you'll get your output style cell. So that shouldn't be new if you're familiar with Wolfram. Yeah, here I just have a little example of some basic math. And then obviously you can follow that same step to insert any of the types of cells that you see in that insert drop down. And like I said, I'll review a couple of them that might be a little less self explanatory. So we have the option for a comment cell here. If you click that one down at the bottom, you're going to get this like yellow background cell. The idea there is that you wouldn't publish a book with any of these comments in it. That's kind of like for you while you're working on your book tool to, to be able to mark a cell and be like, okay, I want to come back and work on this again later, or whatever the note that you have for yourself might be. But that's just kind of an internal use situation. Vocabulary has two options that you might be wondering about. There's a two column and a three column. You know, typical two column is going to Be your term and its definition. And that works well most the time, but sometimes maybe you want to do term and a symbolic representation and a definition or some combination of that. So there is a three column option if that works better for for terms that you want to define for your readers. Exercises, you'll see in the drop down menu there's Exercises plural and that will give you kind of this whole little header that goes at the top of your exercise section and the first exercise. And then if you have that already and you'd like to add another exercise, just go ahead and put your horizontal insertion bar wherever you want to add that. And then do insert just exercise singular. And that'll give you another exercise that should auto number based on what chapter you're in and its position. Amongst the other exercises, you'll see on the insert drop down menu that Q and A Tech notes more to explore or it just says more that is going to insert all three of those sections at once and then if you didn't want one of them, you can always just delete it. There's also options on the insert menu to add more items to each of those. So you know, if you want to add another question, just click question. Hopefully pretty self explanatory. You know, if you already have your Tech notes section but you need to add a second note, you would just click Tech note right here with your insertion bar where you'd like that to go. There's also a references section. I bring this up just because we typically advise authors to keep all their references in a bibliography at the very end of the book. But in some cases it makes more sense to have them in each chapter. So we do have this as an option. If you use the insert menu to add that, you'll see this whole thing pop up. And then you know, this cell here is basically just instructions that we'd like you to use Chicago style. And you can delete that when you're done reading it. Okay, so that's kind of this insert drop down menu. I'll spend just a couple minutes going over the other functions here on the Doc style cell. So next we have the function name drop down which is the next button over from the insert menu. This is an option so that you can add formatting and possibly a link if you'd like to any Wolfram language built in. Wolfram language function that you have within your text or within your code text. So the idea here is that anytime we're using code within text, we want to format it a little differently so that Users can tell that's code. So we apply like a sans serif formatting to it. And the link option is really nice because let's say in this example here we have plot. Maybe your book's not about plot. You don't want to take the whole time to explain what plot is and what plot does, but you know you're using it to get to a greater ends in your book. But maybe you have a reader who doesn't know what plot is and they'd like to know. So if you use this link formatting, not only will it format, it'll also produce a link that goes to the Wolfram language documentation. And obviously, you know, not. Not so helpful for print, but for a Kindle version or if you're doing a zip file of notebooks or any type of electronic distribution, even a PDF, that link can be preserved. And then a reader could just click that. They'd be indicated by that different formatting that, hey, you know, this is something I can click to get a little more info. So the way that you apply that is it's important that it's an actual Wolfram language built in function, and that you have it spelled correctly with its capital letter at the start. But if you have that in either your text or your code text, you can just highlight it and then click format that dropdown and then click Link and it will apply the link and the formatting. If you just click format, it's not going to apply a link. It just does the formatting and this is kind of how it looks. So now instead of being the serif font that matches the rest of text, it's a sans serif font. It looks a little different just to indicate that it's code. So that only works if it's a built in Wolfram language function. You can probably guess what the resource function link button does right next to it. This is going to work if it's something that's included in the Wolfram function repository. So one of those user contributed functions, it works the exact same way. It's important to make sure it's an actual resource function in our repository. It's spelled correctly, it has the right capitalization, but then in either text or code text, you can highlight it, click the button and it will format and link. Next we have the inline code button. It's kind of your third button over here. It does the same thing, except for sometimes you want to format something as code, but it's not a Wolfram language function and it's not a repository function. In this example I show here, you know, it could be variables, it could be brackets. It's meant as code, but it's not one of those other two things that we already talked about in terms of built in functions or repository functions. Um, and it's within your text or your code text. So if you want to format anything else as code in your text or code text, you use this inline code button. Um, and the cool part about it is if you have a whole string of stuff like this example here that includes some functions, but some other characters. We got brackets, curly braces, commas, you know, variables, digits, all sorts of things. If you highlight this whole thing and click the inline code button, it's going to format and link the Wolfram language functions that are in there, and it's just going to format everything else. So that should hopefully be useful as well. The next button over in your Doc cell is the mark cells button. It has a couple options for, I guess, some mostly temporary formatting that you can apply to cells, just to keep things straight as you work on your book. And I'll go through those options now, but to use this marked cells button, you need to click the cell brackets for the cells you want to mark and then go to that button and select which, which version of marking you'd like to give them. So we have here, first option is the tentative option. So again, if you click those cell brackets and then do mark cells, you'd get the options and you'd click the tentative one. Tentative is just meant to be anything you're, like, not sure if you're going to include in your final version, you want to come back and revisit it, it's going to give it this blue color marking so that hopefully you can, you know, remember that something you want to go back and revisit. If you are working on a book that you're going to publish in both a print and electronic format, sometimes you have something that you want in one version, in the print version maybe, and not in the other version. So, so we have this purple coloring you can mark your cells with. If you're like, this is only for the print version. And then by the same token, there's a gray coloring if you want, just for the web version. Um, so that's just to help kind of keep that straight. It might be the case that in the electronic version you have a video, and in the print version you have a static image that represents that video or something like that. So that can help you as you're going through production to keep those straight. Again, not something that you'd leave on for the final version. You don't really want this, you know, purple or gray background coloring, but just to help you while you're working on it. The last one is the locked option. This one doesn't apply any coloring to the cells themselves, just to their brackets. And this one only applies to groups of input and output cells. This is meant for. If you've run some code and maybe it has a random feature in it, or maybe it's dependent on a date or time or location or something like that, and you like how it looks, you want to leave it exactly how it is for your book. You want to remind yourself in the future, okay, we're not going to reevaluate this cell because it might look different. Then you can use that locked option to indicate that. The last two little buttons on the end of the Doc cell are index, field and Toggle. These are used to kind of mark which terms you'd like to index. But at the moment, the. The code that allows you to compile these into an actual index is only available internally. So don't. I would recommend don't use these if you're not working with Wolfram Media on a book project, because I'd hate to see you waste all your time, you know, putting all your index terms in there and then not be able to use them. So, yeah, unfortunately right now the indexing feature is still internal only. Maybe something we could work on in the future making available to everyone. But just ignore these buttons unless you're working with us. The next thing I want to talk about, now that we've kind of covered everything that's on that Doc cell, is we'll explore some more of what's available on the palette itself. So you'll see there was a section called Production Tools, and if you click on that, it will expand, as you see here, into all these other options. You'll see things about page breaks, about font tracking, and all that fun stuff. If your eyes are glazing over and you're really only interested in authoring a notebook that's going to be read by others in notebook format, you can probably just ignore all of this. This is something that our production specialist, Todd, uses a lot to kind of create nice looking PDFs, and we want it to make those options available to any user who was so inclined to do so. But for the basic user, you can probably ignore most of that. Like I said, it's for making nice looking PDFs, and you know, if you want it to self publish, you might find those tools useful as well. And then even more so there's the advanced tools section further down. Again, I'd say like, you know, ignore it unless you feel like you need it, but we want it to make it there and available for people. Not going to get into covering too many of these details in today's session because we're going to keep it a little bit more basic. But there are things for, you know, fixing up links for PDFs and, you know, changing the input and output labels from having a number to having just a little dot if you don't want the numbers, and a couple other more advanced features like that. So you might want to distribute as a PDF. It's a very common file type that almost everyone can open. And like I said, our production specialist, Todd Akers, spends basically his whole job making very nice looking PDFs that can be used for print and stuff. So it is a bit complicated, but the very basics of just making a PDF out of your notebook is super simple. So we'll cover that today too. If you want to turn your notebook into a PDF, the first thing you would do is go into file. You do print settings, you have these options then, and you'd click show page breaks. That's going to make it so that you see two things start to appear in your notebooks. You'll see these black lines that kind of go all the way across the whole screen. And you might see some of these little tick marks that are just on the cell brackets too. Both of those things indicate a page break is going to fall there. The difference at the little tick mark is if it's falling in the middle of a cell. The full black line is if it's between cells. So you might show page breaks and be like, okay, I'm happy with it, and you can just skip this next step. But let's say you don't like that this page break is falling in the middle of the cell. That doesn't seem very conducive to you and you want to move it. That's when you would go into that Production Tools section. Those first two buttons there are page break below and page break above and page break below. You can just go ahead and click the cell bracket for the relevant cell where you either want a page break above it or below it. And then you can click that button on the palette and change it to true. And that will move where that black line is appearing and you'll see where that new page break is instead. So in that way you can move around all your page breaks to wherever you want them. You'll also see other tools that we said, you know, you can ignore if you're not really into formatting PDFs that much. But if you want to do things like cell font tracking, hyphenation, page width, margins, there's options for that in the palette too. And all those are under Production Tools. But back to just our basic how do I create a PDF? After you've seen where your page breaks are, you would want to do File Save As. Then you want to in your own systems window that pops up there, you'd select PDF as the file type and click Save. I do recommend that you go File Save as instead of Print Save as because it creates a PDF a little differently and we've just found through experience that the formatting is nicer if you do the Save as option. There's a lot of issues with links if you use the Print to option. So I would recommend Save as and that will create a PDF that would be able to open in any PDF viewer. There's options to adjust, you know, page numbers and what you want in the running head, and all of that is done via the Options Inspector in Mathematica. Like I said, I'm not going to get too into the nitty gritty of that in this presentation, but that's where you'd go to to adjust things like that. Okay, for the last couple minutes here, before we get to some questions, I wanted to explore a couple new features that have been added to this palette since last year at TechConference. Actually quite recently. Jay, our developer for this palette, was just working on these with me a couple weeks ago. So the first one I want to show you guys is Solved Example. This kind of came about as a result of some of our R and D people who are working on that Wolf for Me textbook series that I talked about at the beginning. They wanted to have an option for showing kind of like a called out example in the middle of the text, almost like you'd see in a textbook. So we added this solved example option here. It's inserted via the Insert dropdown menu, just like any of the other cell types. And if you click it, what you're going to get is a cell that looks like this. So it has a nice orange background applied. It's going to say example and then this number will be different. It will be auto numbered based on what chapter you're in and if you've had any previous examples within that Chapter. So you'll get that and it will have a spot to start typing text. So I've typed some example text here and then probably what you want to show in an example is an example of code. So then you can put your horizontal bar right below that and click the solved example input button from your insert drop down menu and you'll get, you know, the opportunity to start typing input that still continues that orange box. And then you can shift enter and that will create output that continues that orange box too. There is an option to add more text, the solved example text option here. After this, there might be some gaps within the orange box depending what order you order. Add these things in and you can adjust the cell margins using the production tools in the palette if you need to. But the idea here is like just a nice called out example. Maybe it doesn't go with the narrative text of everything else you're saying around it, but you want it to include the example. So this is kind of a visual indicator of an example. The other cool feature that is new this year that I wanted to highlight is the Make Contents button. I'll show you how to do it with and without page numbers and explain kind of the differences of why you might want to use one versus the other. But first we'll do without page numbers. That's a little bit more basic. So how you'd use it is you just go ahead and click the Make Contents button and it's going to have you select the directory that you want to make contents of. So that should be where all of your chapters are stored. You see here I have a couple sample chapters. I got an appendix, a preface. Then it's going to open up this dialog. And the first part here is you're going to choose if you want sections, subsections and sub subsections included in your contents. So maybe you're like, I just want my chapter titles. Those are the sections. Uncheck the other two. But maybe you want all of this included in your contents. You can leave them all checked. Obviously, any combination of that is fair game as well. This next section here is you need to put ordinal numbers to choose the order of your chapters. Otherwise Mathematica is going to assume that they should be alphabetical. If you have an appendix, chances are you want it at the end, not the beginning, even though it starts with A. So you're going to go ahead and select the order that you want each of these to fall in. You know, based on saying it's cut off here, but I put my preface as number one, chapter one as number two, and so on. For this first example, we're going to leave page numbers unchecked and just go ahead and click Make Contents. Then you'll have to name your contents file. It's important that you save it in the same directory as your chapters, because what it's going to do is create links and they'll be broken if it's in a different directory. So once you save it, you will get a notebook that pops up that should have all your contents on it. It's kind of nicely styled. You know, we have our sections and subsections and sub subsections, because that's what we selected in this example. And this is just a screenshot again, but if it was a live notebook, you'd be able to click any one of these and it would open up that notebook as well. And, and that works because they're all in the same directory. But yes, this contents version with, with just no page numbers and just a list of everything that links is really useful if you're publishing in an electronic format. And maybe you don't really care about page number distinctions, maybe you don't even have them because you're just using a notebook. But if you are distributing as a PDF or in print, you might care more about page numbers. So we have an option to add page numbers. There are still a couple of limitations for this one that I want to warn you about. Like I said, this is new this year and we'll hopefully be working on broadening it and kind of solving some bugs and helping it to work in more situations in the future. But for now, you can only use the page numbers when you're using the Make Contents feature. If Mathematica has automatically selected all the page breaks, so that means you haven't, as we showed before, moved any page breaks around at this time. The Make Contents does not play nice if you move your page breaks around. So if you have done that, I'd recommend, you know, just create your contents without page numbers and manually add your page numbers for now until we kind of solve that bug. It also doesn't work right now if you have any page numbers that are numbered with Roman numerals. Sometimes we do that for front matter and books. In order to get it to work, they all have to be regular, you know, one through nine digits. So no Roman numerals at this time. But if you haven't run into either of those two pitfalls and you want to use the page numbers portion, here's how to do it. So there is kind of an initial step that we didn't have when we weren't including page numbers. And that is that you have to start the printing. You have to set the printing starting page number for each chapter using the option Inspector. So if you haven't used the option Inspector in Mathematica before, you just need to go to format option Inspector. You'll get a little guy that looks like this that will open up. This little drop down on the left side is going to say selection to start with. And you'll want to click the drop down. And instead of selection, pick whatever chapter you're working on first. And you'll want to start with your first chapter. Then you'll go over to the search and start typing in printing starting page number. Get like half of that in there. It'll come up and you just click here and change this to whatever page number you want it to be. You might be wondering, okay, how do I know what page number I want it to be? Start with your first chapter, have that one, start on page one. And then what you'll do is you'll save your first chapter once you've change this to one. Actually one is default, so you probably don't really have to do that one. And you'll scroll down through your first chapter with the page breaks showing. So again, that's file print settings show page breaks. And once you get to the bottom, it will say what page you're on. So this is the bottom of my first notebook. It says, okay, you're on page four. Then we always have our chapters start on an odd number page. If you want to start them on even, I guess that's up to you. But in this case it doesn't matter because the next page is odd. So if chapter one ends on page four, then you just know chapter two has to start on page five. So you would come in and put page five for the printing starting page number of chapter two. Then you'd repeat that process with all the chapters. So you'd scroll to the bottom of chapter two, see what page that ends on, and start chapter three on the next page you would need for each and every chapter. Go in and set that printing starting page number and then resave all of them once you've set that. Now that you've done that initial step, you can use make contents very similarly to how we did without the page numbers. You're going to click the button. You're going to choose your directory that has all your notebooks in it. You'll get this dialog again and have the option to choose, you know, subsections that you want included. You'll number and order your chapters. This time you'll check to include page numbers. Once again, you'll have to save that contents. You'll have to pick a name for it. I just called mine contents. And save that in the same directory as all your chapters. Then it's going to generate a notebook that looks like this. So very similar to our first one, but also includes page numbers. These again, this is a screenshot, but if it was an active notebook, these links are also still working just like they were without the page numbers. So hopefully that feature is really useful to people. I was excited to see it added. We had a couple authors mention to us that they wish there was a Make Contents feature and it certainly makes sense in a palette about book publishing. So working on making it a little more robust. But we're excited about that feature. And that is the end of my little demonstration on using book tools. As you can tell, there's kind of more in depth things that you can do with it, but those are the basics that'll definitely get you started. And yeah, at this time I'd like to take some questions if anyone has any. And yeah, thank you for joining. I'm going to look through the Q and A and just.

Hi, Paige, can you hear me?

Yes, hi, Trey. And hi.

I have a few questions in the Q and A that I thought would be good for you to answer.

Sure. What is the first one?

The first one from Sotiri Smith. Is it possible for a user to sign a single notebook, to distribute it, for example, as a report and be sure that it won't be altered?

There are some methods for like locking it down and making sure that people can't submit changes. But again, I am not a developer and I would recommend that we reroute your question to Andy Hunt, who does that for us. I think it is possible to do it to a single notebook. We normally do it to zip files. But I'll say why don't you go ahead and email me and I'll get you connected with him after you can email publishingolfram.com great.

And they also asked if chapter name should follow a naming convention.

Yeah, I mean, I definitely recommend that you do at least establish your own naming convention. Um, for us, when we're working on a book, we tend to name them with like the chapter number. So let's say it's chapter three and that we do like three dash, whatever the name of the chapter is, um. It's always good not to have spaces in your Mathematica file names in case you need to call them in functions later. So yeah, I, I would recommend we always put the chapter number as a numeral at the beginning so that they order correctly within the directory, which is helpful to see. But like you saw with the contents, you know, you can reorder them for your contents, but something that works for you and keep it consistent would be my recommendation.

All right, can you see all the questions, by the way?

Yeah, I think the next one I see is from Marco.

That's right.

Okay, I see how to put a caption under a figure and how to number equations. It's not in the insert drop down menu. Sorry, I'm answering your second question first, how to number equations. But you can go into format just in Mathematica. This is in all notebooks, not just Wolfram Book Tools notebooks. And there's a style for equation numbered that you can select there. So I'd recommend using that and that will auto number based on how many other numbered equations you have in your chapter. For how to put a caption under a figure. We don't have a style for that in Wolfram Book Tools and maybe that's a good suggestion for something that we should add. But we do tend to do more of that style where we have code, text and then code and not so much like a figure caption style. Yeah, we don't have one for that at the moment in this style sheet. Is Mathematica also able to interact with systems like Text Live? I'm actually not familiar with Text Live. Again, not the most technical person in terms of programming. So I, I'd again have to say that's a question that I unfortunately can't answer. I know that we are able to convert into other formats. I know you know, things like latex, we have some conversion that that's able to convert into that style sheet. So unfortunately I'm not familiar with Text Live, but it's possible. Let's see, next one here. Does Wolfram Media have your own copy editors and proofreaders in house or do you outsource? That is a good question. Yes, we do have our own copy editors and proofreaders in house. The tech company word for copy editor is dqa, which stands for Document Quality Assurance. So we have a whole team of DQA people that do a really great job. And again, that's kind of reserved for those people who would be working in the traditional where we're serving as your full service publisher model and not so much for the zip file of eBooks, but we do have those people on staff. And then if you were using one of our other publishing models, I would just recommend that you work with a freelance editor. But yes, we do have them on staff. I see. If you'd like to alter the default appearance, for example, of a solved example block. Should we do it through a style notebook or a different method applies? If you want to alter it for like your whole book, not just one instance, I would very much recommend do it in the style sheet and create your own custom style. Maybe you're like, I don't like orange, I want it to be blue or something like that. Create that in your style sheet so that you can reuse it in different chapters instead of just editing it one time. Is there a recording of this? I think there is. I don't know how it's being sent out, unfortunately. Is it possible to convert latex to notebook? Yes, but I think there's some difficulties that crop up with it. One person on our team, who I didn't mention, his name is Glenn, he works on some stuff that we do with academic journals. He's kind of an expert on that. So if, if you're struggling with latex conversion, you can go ahead and write into publishingolfram.com and I'll try to connect you with him. Is it possible to outsource our work after finishing our work within Mathematica to an external software like Microsoft Publisher or existing publishing app? Yes and no. I think the, the thing that Mathematica is probably going to be most useful for is creating in terms of other file formats is creating a PDF. PDF is really great because it can be used for print and it can also be used for fixed format Kindle. Fixed format Kindle is basically, it's. It's similar to a PDF in that it's kind of static and it is what we do for most of our books in terms of Kindle format because they're so graphic heavy. If you were doing a book that was just text, you'd do what's called reflowable format Kindle, which is where you can, you know, pinch in and change the size of the text. But if you create a PDF, you can create a pick a fixed format Kindle book right from it that maintains all the graphics and stuff. So I'd say that's kind of your best bet in terms of going to other software. And then can I send a PDF for examining. I'm not sure I know exactly what you mean by that. But yeah, you can certainly send PDFs. Once you create them, you would be able to send them, you know, just like you would send any other PDF. You could send it to just about anyone, because most people have some way to open a PDF. So yes.