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Typesetting and printing a family memoir (2017)

July 17, 2017 In the 1980s, my great-uncle, André Klat, wrote his memoirs on a typewriter. The memoirs included the family history going back to 1760 and charming stories of his youth and adulthood in Egypt.

I added 465 index entries, 21 photos from the family's archives, and 84 footnotes to translate foreign language phrases or explain references to famous people of that era. I then designed a Markdown-inspired markup language that handled just enough to do what I needed (italics, small caps, headers, page references, footnotes, images, index entries, and special sections). Elsayed later bought the company from my uncle, but had to smuggle the payment out of Egypt in eight trips to Lebanon, with the cash sewn into his suit by his tailor.

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