This blog has been dormant for many years—largely during the period I was working at Overleaf as their Content Development Editor. Sadly, after nearly nine years, I was made redundant from my role at Overleaf in December 2025, just a week before Christmas. It came as quite a shock, but at least it has given me the time to rekindle this blog and start publishing new articles again, while I take stock and work out what comes next.  The hard reality is that, at my age, employment opportunities are likely to be extremely scarce—particularly in the shadow of AI and against a rather bleak economic backdrop. Still, it’s always best to remain hopeful, no matter what life throws at you.

I do enjoy technical writing, and this blog has long served as a kind of creative outlet—a place where I can share and document my interests in the lower-level technical aspects of tools and technologies related to the authorship, production and publication of technical content. Over time, I’ve had various interests in the programmatic production of digital content—graphics, PDF, SVG, multilingual text processing/typesetting, compiling TeX engines from source code, utilizing OpenType font technologies, including colour, emoji, and variable fonts. These days, my TeX-related interests have narrowed and are largely focused on LuaHBTeX—particularly its remarkable FFI and token libraries. I see many potential applications for this powerful TeX engine, especially extensions via external libraries and DLLs.

I’ve owned the domain readytext.co.uk for many years, and on 1 January 2011—purely on a whim—I finally decided to do something with it. This site was launched (if you can call it that) at around 3 p.m. UK time.

Contact

You can contact me on Twitter as @publishergeek