Piecing Together a Printed Copy of "On Lisp"

TL;DR

Here's a re-creation (in SVG) of the missing figures from Paul Graham's "On Lisp", based on scans of the missing figures (thanks to Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan).

And here's an updated version of the PDF (2.7MB) that includes the figures and which has been tweaked for printing as a 6x9 book at Lulu.

Tedious Details

I prefer reading printed copies of books, so when I finally got around to reading Paul Graham's "On Lisp", I was keen to find a printed version.

The book is long out of print, and used copies are selling for hundreds of dollars, but Paul Graham has very kindly made a PDF of the book available. So I decided to put together a print-on-demand version at Lulu.

Format

The Amazon listing for the original book says that the size was 8.9x5.9 inches (which seems about right to me, roughly matching the size of my copy of ANSI Common Lisp).

I've had pretty good experiences with Lulu for print-on-demand books in the past, and it looks like the nearest size there is "US Trade", 6x9 inches.

The PDF file is sized at 8.5x11 inches, but the text block is fairly small within it – it looks to be around 323x505 (PostScript) points, with an extra 33 points above it for a head. Overall, this means the printed area of the PDF falls within around 4.5x7.5 inches, which should be fine as-is for a 6x9 bound copy.

Next, checking the page numbering I noticed that page 1 of the book falls at the 14th page of the PDF. That means it will fall on a left-hand page, but it should be on a right-hand page, and the same is true through the rest of the book – the page with 29 printed at the top right is page 42 of the PDF, and so will fall left not right. The numbering of the front matter (i, ii, iii, iv etc) falls correctly, so I inserted a blank page (effectively page xiv) after the table of contents and before the main body of the book.

To create the PDF, I did the following steps in Adobe Acrobat 7:

• Download the Lulu settings for Adobe Distiller
• Open the PostScript version of the document in Acrobat, which turns it into a PDF via Distiller.
• Crop with Document, Crop Pages. Set margins of 1.0, 1.0, 1.25, 1.25 inches and crop all pages. (After the fact, in the printed copy the text block is slightly low on the page; possibly margins of top=1.2, bottom=0.8 might have been better.)
• Create a 6x9 blank page PDF by running the following TeX file through XeTeX:

\special{papersize=6.0in,9.0in}
\nopagenumbers
\end

• Insert it after the last page of the Table of Contents with Document, Insert Pages.
• Add the diagrams by creating custom stamps from PNG files (Tools, Commenting, Stamps). On creating the stamps, ensure "Down sample to reduce file size" is not set – if it is, they don't appear in the final version for some unknown reason.
• Add arrow annotations for figures 7.2 and 7.3 using arrows and pencil marks (Tools, Drawing Markups). This was surprisingly difficult to do; I never got a result I was happy with, but at least the intent of the diagram is clear.
• Flatten each of the pages that has a stamp or drawing on it, using these instructions.
• Save the PDF document.

Content: Missing Diagrams

The PDF download page notes that 9 of the diagrams are missing from the PDF, so I wanted to hunt down copies of those pictures. A thread on comp.lang.lisp from September 2009 indicated that only 7 figures were actually missing, and Patrick May gave their descriptions as:

• "Figure 5.7: Lists as trees." (p.71) is just a diagram showing the lists (a . b), (a b c), and (a b (c d)) rendered as trees.
• "Figure 20.2: Two Trees." (p.263) is another pair of circle and line drawings of trees, which are shown as lists on page 262 [specifically (a (b (d h)) (c e (f i) g)) and (1 (2 (3 6 7) 4 5))].
• "Figure 22.11: A directed graph with a loop." (p.302) is a circle and arrow drawing of a DAG, with nodes a, b, and c forming a loop and edges going from a to d and d to e.
• "Figure 23.2: Graph of a small ATN." (p.307) is a simple oval and arrow drawing of a node s with an edge labeled "noun" to node s2 which in turn has an edge labeled "verb" to node s3. s and s2 are ovals with solid lines, s3 is an oval with a dashed line.
• "Figure 23.6: Graph of a larger ATN." (p.315) is a larger oval and arrow drawing showing noun phrases, pronouns, prepositions, etc.
• "Figure 24.1: Layers of abstraction." (p.322) looks something like this

                              prolog programs 
                                   prolog 
  nondeterministic choice 
                                                          pattern-matching 
  continuation-passing macros 
                              lisp + utilities 
  

• "Figure 25.2: Multiple paths to a superclass." (p.352) shows the standard multiple inheritance diamond of death with class a inheriting from both b and c, each of which inherit from d.

Continuing to search the web, it a gentleman called Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan posted a scan of the missing diagrams at www.zerobeat.in/wiki/doku.php?id=onlisp_missing_figures in 2009, but that site is now gone. The Google cache and the Wayback Machine don't seem to have anything helpful, and Google Books doesn't show any content that might hold the pictures either.

So I emailed Ramakrishnan and he sent me a copy of the scans, which are now available here.

From the scans, it becomes clear why there was confusion about the count of missing figures (7 or 9). Two extra figures are mostly code examples, but with arrows drawn on:

• "Figure 7.2: Diagram used in writing memq" (p.89): Arrow from x on top line to x on bottom line; arrow from choices on top line to choices on bottom line.
• "Figure 7.3: Diagram using in writing while." (p.90): Arrow from hungry on line 1 to hungry on line 7; vertical line next to lines 2-4 with an arrow to a vertical line next to lines 8-10.

In the meanwhile, I'd attempted to recreate the figures from these descriptions and from the surrounding text, in SVG using Inkscape. My efforts were mostly fairly close to the actual figures once they arrived, so I've tweaked the formatting to match more exactly and stuck with the SVG versions. Each diagram links through to its SVG source.

• 
  Figure 5.7: Lists as trees.
• 
  Figure 20.2: Two Trees.
• 
  Figure 22.11: A directed graph with a loop.
• 
  Figure 23.2: Graph of a small ATN.
• 
  Figure 23.6: Graph of a larger ATN.
• 
  Figure 24.1: Layers of abstraction.
• 
  Figure 25.2: Multiple paths to a superclass.

Cover

It would be nice to recreate the original cover of the book, so I went looking for source materials.

• From here I found a 308x475 GIF file of the front cover.
• From a discussion in comp.lang.lisp, I found a link to a big (3624x5384, 11.3MB) TIFF file with a scan of the back cover.
• In the same discussion, someone else posted a link to a full cover TIFF image, but it's only 900x640 pixels.

For a 6x9" paperback with 427 pages, the Lulu cover wizard gives dimensions:

• Spine width: 69.24 Postscript points wide (2.442 cm) (289 px)
• Spine begins 441 Postscript points (15.56 cm) (1838 px) from the left.
• Total cover width: 951.24 X 666 Postscript points (33.55 cm x 23.49 cm) (3964px x 2775px)
• If using an image, its resolution should be set to 300dpi

Putting this together into Photoshop, I ended up with a rough-and-ready one-piece cover here (13MB PNG).

Publishing

After all of the preparation above, getting the Lulu version of the book set up was straightforward. Lulu's pricing (as of Jan 2011) comes out as:

• $4.50 binding fee for perfect binding.
• $8.54 = 427 pages x $0.02 per page.
• $13.04 total.

Copyright (c) 2011 David Drysdale

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