Windows Everywhere: Some Good News

Writing is an interesting career. There are almost manic periods of productivity, where I lose track of time and make incredible progress. And yes, there are occasional times when the writing just doesn’t come. But more often than that, I can blame external forces for setbacks. And such was the case with the Leanpub publishing issues I tried to explain in Windows Everywhere: Hitting a Wall. Problems that were so illogical and so problematic that it just ground the entire thing to a halt.

This is frustrating. And I wanted to voice those frustrations because I know some people are inexplicably waiting for this book even though it’s available here on the site and has been for a long time. And because sometimes I need that outlet. To get it out.

But solving a problem is more important than voicing it, and so I turned to Rafael for help. Rafael understands the Leanpub publishing system in ways I never will, and he set up the GitHub-based system that I used to translate the over 150 Markdown files and over 640 images (though I hope to dramatically reduce that figure) into a book that people can actually read.

Rafael couldn’t actually fix this problem, but that was in a small way kind of satisfying to me because I was convinced that it wasn’t my fault—meaning that it wasn’t an issue with the formatting of those hundreds and hundreds of files—but was instead something wrong with Leanpub. Better still, in the course of troubleshooting the problem, we started down a path that proved that it was Leanpub and not me.

The book consists of almost 20 sections, each of which includes several chapters. Some sections are longer than others, by word count, and some contain many more images than others. When I had issues publishing previews while working in the Windows 8 section (which is actually just called 8), I started cutting out future sections, including the Code section that sits at the back. Doing so, oddly, allowed the preview to publish without errors. At some point in our troubleshooting, I had an idea: what if I removed the 8 section and put the Code section back in? And sure enough, it successfully previewed. This meant a few things, among them that there was nothing wrong with that Code section and that I had wasted a ton of time trying to figure out a problem that had nothing to do with what I did. This was Leanpub’s fault.

Rafael contacted Leanpub support, and while we had expected to hear back quickly, we still haven’t. But I walked away from this feeling good about myself—I didn’t cause these issues—but weird about having almost finished this damn thing and not being able to get it out into the world. There is nothing worse for a writer—nothing—than being done with something—almost done, in this case—and not being able to publish. We live for that instant gratification.

Not surprisingly, I’ve been thinking about this ever since. I’ve read your comments. And it occurred to me that I should still work on the book and get it into a publishable state while I waited for Leanpub to get its act together. And as it turns out, Leanpub does offer a way to get around my preview issues. That is, in addition to previewing the entire book, I can preview just a subset of the book. And that means that I could work on the final chapters I hadn’t edited—a handful of chapters in the 8 section and all four of the chapters in 10 (yes, the Windows 10 section)—and tell Leanpub to do subset previews of just that work.

And so I started down that path today. And something interesting happened. Something unexpected.

When I published my first subset preview—basically all of the files in 8—it did so quickly, as I’ve come to expect from a subset preview. But when I downloaded and opened the resulting PDF file, it wasn’t the subset chapters only. It was the entire book. And that entire book included the updates I had added before I generated the preview.

Huh.

To be clear, this is also a mistake/bug on Leanpub’s part: subset previews only impact the files you specify for the subset, and the resulting PDF you create is likewise only made up of those files, and not the entire book. To test that I was correct about that—always the self-doubter—I did a subset preview of the Windows 11 Field Guide. And sure, enough, it pumped out a subset of the book, not the entire book. So that is how it is supposed to work. And how it usually works.

So what’s the difference between the Windows 11 Field Guide and Windows Everywhere from a Leanpub perspective? The former is formatted for an older version of Leanpub’s publishing system and the latter is formatted to the latest version. Clearly, that new version has issues. Issues that I uncovered while trying to get this damn book out into the world.

Excited by this, and vaguely worried that Leanpub would fix things before I finished, I proceeded to finish editing the last several chapters in the book, wrapping things up at roughly 6 pm. And with the last chapter in the can, I went to preview the final version of the book—well, the first full version of the book—so I could see this thing, finally, as a completed work.

The build failed.

Oh come on.

But given the success I’d had all day, I figured there was a mistake in there somewhere, some lazy formatting error that had nothing to do with Leanpub. But no, the code looked fine to me. It had to be something else. And finally, my eyes settled on something that was formatted correctly but looked like the type of thing that just might trip up Leanpub’s fragile publishing system. It was a screenshot. And the code looked like so:

{width: 100%}
![](Windows-8.1-Box-Shot.jpg)

This code would have worked perfectly in the older Leanpub formatting system. But I’m not as familiar with the new version. Was that period between the “8” and the “1” really enough to grind this entire process to a halt, to stop the production of a nearly 1,000-page tome?

Yes. It was. I renamed the file to Windows-81-Box-Shot.jpg, changed the code to match, pushed my changes to GitHub, and re-tried the preview process at Leanpub. And it worked. The book, all 989 pages of it, was successfully created.

(Edit: I had left out a chapter file by mistake, so the actual page count is now 993 pages. –Paul)

So here’s the thing.

I figured out that the way to get around the Leanpub bugs was to use subset previews instead of full previews. And I wish I had figured this out 2 or 3 days ago, because I would have saved myself a lot of heartache. But I’m not sure what will happen if I actually try to publish the book. If that completes successfully, that means the book will be made public and people can start buying it. If it doesn’t … well, shit. I don’t know what to do then. There’s no such thing as a subset publish.

For now, I will wait until we hear from Leanpub. And I have a few little things to fix in the “front matter,” the introductory text at the beginning of the book, and I need Rafael’s help with that. I also want to reduce the page count, and to do that, I need to exorcise a lot of images and, as importantly, reduce their size. I’ll work through that tomorrow.

But I’m in a better place than I was when I wrote Windows Everywhere: Hitting a Wall. And so is the book. It’s almost here, barring any more Leanpub issues, I guess.