Book production system

Beyond its actual content, the production of this book was a highly complex process that relied on the methodology for software releases developed at my company over the past fifteen years. Had I been starting the book now I would likely have authored all of it directly in Mathematica and Publicon. But a decade ago I made the decision to compose all the original source for the book in FrameMaker. This source was then processed by an elaborate automated procedure much like a standard software build. The first step involved converting a MIF version of the complete source into a Mathematica symbolic expression. Then within Mathematica various transformations and tests were done on this expression—with for example every program in these notes being formatted and broken into lines using rules similar to Mathematica StandardForm. The resulting symbolic expressions were then converted back to MIF, formatted in FrameMaker, and automatically output as PDF. (Note that special characters in programs are rendered using the new Mathematica-Sans font specifically created for the book.) (See also the colophon at the very end of the book.)