Improvements to Our Book Format
The books we publish at Lumen et Logos are works that have stood the test of time. Some were written centuries ago, yet are as relevant today as when they were first composed. We hold ourselves to the standard that these works deserve: every edition should be a pleasure to read, formatted with care, and free of the small errors that chip away at a reader's experience. Getting the details right matters to us, because the authors got the details right, and our readers deserve no less.
With that in mind, we want to share some recent improvements we made to the way our books are generated. At Lumen et Logos, every book we publish goes through a typesetting pipeline before it reaches your hands. Rather than manually laying out each page, we built a system that takes the text of a book and automatically produces a professionally formatted PDF, the same file that gets sent to the printer for our physical editions. This process sounds simple in principle but requires getting a lot of small details exactly right. Recently, we made several improvements that noticeably raised the quality of the output.
Accurate Table of Contents Page Numbers
One of the trickier problems we solved involved the table of contents. In some of our books, many chapters are "unnumbered", meaning they don't show a chapter number, just a title (think a Preface, Introduction, or Appendix). For these chapters, we were seeing page numbers in the table of contents that were off by one page.
The root cause was subtle: the instruction that registers a chapter's entry in the table of contents was running before the chapter's page break, so it was recording the last page of the previous chapter instead of the first page of the new one. Swapping the order of those two instructions fixed the problem.
The Table of Contents No Longer Lists Itself
The table of contents page was showing up as its own entry in the table of contents which is unnecessary. We added a small instruction that temporarily hides the table of contents from itself while it's being generated, then restores normal behavior afterward. The result is a clean, self-consistent table of contents.
Consistent Page Numbering in the Front Matter
Our books use Roman numerals (i, ii, iii…) for the front matter (the title page, table of contents, and any prefatory material) before switching to regular Arabic numerals for the main text. This is standard book convention.
The problem was that a stray instruction was resetting the Roman numeral counter partway through the front matter. So if the table of contents ended on page vi, the following pages (a Preface, for example) would incorrectly restart at i. Removing that instruction means the Roman numeral count now runs continuously through all the front matter, as it should.
A Note to Our Readers
These fixes were initiated based on feedback from customers who spotted issues in their copies — we're grateful for those reports. If you notice anything off in one of our editions, please send us an email at lumen.et.logos@gmail.com.