Tag
Automation
4 articles
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When to take the helm back: retiring a docs pipeline once the work turns editorial
A generated LaTeX book taught me the rarer docs-as-code move - not building a pipeline, but dissolving one. When every remaining edit is a one-off typographic judgment, a 453-line generator stops earning its keep, and the right call is to freeze its output, delete the generator, and edit the source by hand.
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Non-blocking preflight, or: a build that always produces a PDF
One hard stop, five soft failures, a renamed file, and a report alongside it. The design philosophy behind a preflight that never aborts - plus the pikepdf/PyMuPDF six-check implementation and the --strict flag for CI.
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Why hand-maintained InDesign files rot - and what docs-as-code does instead
A 370-cell calendar that shifts every year. A lead's name in three places. An IBAN in an invisible text box. These are not unusual InDesign problems - they are what InDesign files become when they accumulate facts with no single home. Two projects show what the alternative looks like - and where InDesign's own global tools stop short.
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A decade of Word 97 conference files, rebuilt for the web for $30
How we transformed unstructured Word 97/2000 files into a decade-long web publication of conferences-using Markdown, Python, and GPT-powered automation for just $30.