Colophon

"The Lone Argonaut" began life as a document for Microsoft Word 97 for Mac. After switching from Mac OS 9 to Ubuntu in January 2007, I migrated the manuscript to OpenDocument. Pretty soon thereafter I began to strongly prefer marked-up plain text to opaque word-processing documents, so I changed to an ad-hoc markup which I translated into LaTeX with a small Perl preprocessor. Then I got fed up with LaTeX's limitations, so I went wild and created my own lightweight semantic markup language, Zink. ("Zink" stands for "Zink Is Not an Acronym".) The implementation consists of a parser written in Haskell using Parsec and two renderers, one a Haskell program that produces XHTML and the other an OpenOffice.org macro written in Python that produces an OpenDocument. Yes, I use Zink for more than just "TLA". I haven't formally released it because I doubt anybody would want it, honestly (aren't there enough of these document languages already?), but should you be interested, I could certainly give you a copy. Of course, if you want to modify the novel or produce a new edition of it, you'll want to work with the source markup rather than the output.

The HTML edition uses valid markup and is supposed to be as accessible as possible. I care about accessibility more than the average programmer because, given that I'm legally blind and I run an OS that isn't Windows, naive Web design can make a site very inconvenient for me to use.