Part IV

Appendix A: About This Book

Technical information the reader may want to know

Writing Style

This book follows periods with 2 spaces, not 1. The 2-space rule was also in place due to fixed-width fonts, but unlike the punctuation-quotes rules, it has fierce opposition, with both sides claiming victory. Even the American Psychological Association has gone from officially recommending 1 space, then recommending 1 or 2 spaces, then back to 2 spaces (in their 6th edition), then back to 1 space (7th edition). This does not inspire confidence in their craft. I will be using 2 spaces because it has been shown that using 2 spaces after a period increases text processing ability¹.

While it is customary to spell out numbers in a sentence, for the most part, numbers in a sentence will be shown as numerals when they refer to a quantity, e.g., “There is 1 apple” vs. “Alone with one’s thoughts”. This allows quantitative numerical values to be easily recognizable, increasing text processing ability. This style also avoids the inconsistent and differing rules of when it is proper to spell out numbers, such as: any number less than 10, 13, 100, always at the beginning of a sentence, never a date, day, time, decimals, money, in titles, percentage, etc. The general rule in writing is “when in doubt, spell it out”, but there is no doubt with the rule “If it’s a unit of measure in any dimension (time, value, length, quantity, ratio, etc.), it’s a numeral”.

When it comes to the capitalization of the names of celestial objects, which is still a very unsettled debate, this book follows the recommendation of the American Physical Society (APS) and capitalizes all non-generic references, for example, “Our Universe, Sun, and Moon are an instance of many universes, suns, and moons”.

Low-Tech Issues

My apologies for the sometimes crude layout of the book in general. Once upon a time, I was a young typographer back in the days when the job often included the re-melting of lead “pigs” that were used to set the type using the Linotype machines of the day. That drudgery has been replaced with endlessly tweaking semi-compatible markup languages such as Markdown, LaTeX, PDF, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (I was much better at melting “pigs”).

One of the challenges in writing this book was getting color images to appear meaningful in black and white ebook readers. In some cases, it was not possible, especially considering various ebook readers use various schemes to deal with colors.

To that end, here is a simple color wheel showing how your e-reader treats at least the 6 basic colors. The center shows the 6 shades of white to black.

The sad and current state of ebook readers is that most do not support anything but the most basic formatting, and even that is often spotty, especially regarding blockquotes and lists, and even more so if the e-reader is older. Using color is discouraged for ebook publishers, but that is not possible in this book. Feel free to download the latest version in color PDF from https://tholonia.com.

If you are reading this on an ebook reader, the chances that it will look especially ugly are quite high. This is because many ebook reader manufacturers take it upon themselves to deliberately eliminate the layout the author has developed and replace it with their own generic (and, IMHO, hideous) one-size-fits-all format. The only upside to this that I can imagine is for the manufacturer, as it frees them from having to deal with more complex layouts. I find this practice offensive to the author and the reader, not to mention reinforcing the standards of banality. There are ways around this, but it involves downloading software and installing patches on the ebook reader.