The author completed two novellas — the first roughly 50 pages (15k words) over 7 months, the second 120 pages (40k words) in just 10 days — but has no plans to publish either. After years of avoiding fiction, a reading binge starting in July 2025 led to ~30 novels consumed, which sparked the writing experiment.
Both works are typeset in groff, the classic Unix typesetter usually reserved for manual pages. The appeal: raw speed. On a 13.5-year-old PC, the 50-page novella renders in 700 ms, the 120-page version in 1.6 seconds. The author built a tiny custom macro package with three macros (SH for chapter titles, PP for hanging-indent paragraphs, LP for scene breaks).
The post walks through the full pipeline: groff formatting, footers, page numbers, German hyphenation, Markdown pre-processing, Vim with Goyo for distraction-free writing, reflowing text, and Git versioning. A demo tarball (demo-book.tar.gz) bundles the complete setup.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing