Harry Potter and the Methods Of Rationality

https://github.com/rrthomas/hpmor Maintainer: Reuben Thomas rrt@sc3d.org

A LaTeX version of the popular didactic fan-fiction by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which can make e-books in PDF, ePub and Mobi formats, and six PDF volumes that can be printed and bound. There are also dust jackets for the printable volumes.

See latest release for PDF and e-book downloads.

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. In the six-volume PDFs, all chapters are renumbered to start from 1 at the start of a book, and there are no appendices. Some epigraphs have been omitted but are in the source files of the chapters.

Files

• hpmor.tex - the main file
• layout/hp-format.tex - mostly sets up memoir
• layout/hp-markup.tex - logical markup commands used in the text
• chapters/ - one file per chapter, included from hpmor.tex and the individual volumes hpmor-N.tex.
• spelling-list.txt - a list of words used to spell-check the book.
• fonts/ - various fonts used
• latexmkrc - 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 as latexmk (see below), which may be useful for editor integration (e.g. Emacs).
• scripts/ebook/ - e-book generation scripts

Building the book(s)

If you do not want to install all requirements on your native system, you can run the build in a Docker container instead. See bottom of Dockerfile for further info.

• 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 PDF hpmor.pdf
• latexmk hpmor-N: Build one of the six individual volumes hpmor-1.pdf to hpmor-6.pdf.
• latexmk layout/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 layout/hp-paper-type.tex; see layout/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 layout/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 the following categories:

1. Textual corrections (where the text differs from the online original unintentionally).
2. Textual improvements: fixing straight-up errors in the English (or deeper, the sense, story etc.), or “Britfixing”, i.e. replacing non-British usages.
3. 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”.
4. Translations. Translations are of course most welcome! A list of known translations and one or two hints are given below in the next section.

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:}

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 layout/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.

Translations

To translate the book, it is recommended to fork this repository, and check back from time to time for updates. Also, do open an issue or PR against this file to add the translation!

It is recommended to use polyglossia (not babel).

Known translations

Note: there are other translations of HPMOR; here are listed only translations of this edition.

• French (complete)
• German (complete)