The core of Monoline.

We don’t undercut. We out-tool..

While the industry giants lock publishers and designers into Adobe's rent-a-desk model — $660+ per year per employee, multiplied across entire creative teams — we run on leaner, meaner, battle-tested machinery. Tools built when software had to last decades, not just survive until the next bug-patch ransom. Sure, alternatives exist. Affinity, Canva, QuarkXPress all promise escape routes.

But here's the thing: most experts are trained and conditioned on Adobe anyway. Years of muscle memory, client expectations for .ai files, team workflows built around Creative Cloud collaboration. The switching costs aren't just financial — they're operational suicide.

Adobe doesn't just sell software; they sell ecosystem dependency. But here's the thing: your readers don't care what software made their book. They care about clean typography, proper margins, and words that flow. We deliver all of that without feeding the subscription beast, without the crashes, without the bloat. You get professional publishing output while we handle the tools that actually work.

SPEED

Zero setup time. Our classes are pre-optimized for the most common university requirements and print layouts — we won't waste nights wrestling with margins and fonts. We maintain different classes for different formats:

Paperback: A-format (110×178 mm), B-format (130×198 mm — the most popular), C-format (135×216 mm)
Hardcover: Demy (138×216 mm), Royal (156×234 mm)
Most universal: B-format for paperbacks, Demy for hardcovers — widely adopted across Europe, UK, Australia, and beyond

In other words: we're locked, loaded, and ready to fire.

TOOLS

LaTeX. Ghostscript. Pandoc. Fonts older than your dad's best suit. They're still breathing — still meaner, leaner, and faster than anything Creative Cloud dreams of. Still in print, still relevant, still delivering cleaner output than any modern alternative. Tools that survive 40+ years have passed intellectual and technical natural selection.

These aren’t “alternatives.” They’re the backbone of academic and technical publishing. Tried, tested, still punching.

CODE

This part gets technical — but that's the point. We want to show you exactly what we handle so you don't have to figure it out yourself. No midnight Stack Overflow hunts, no "why won't this compile?" moments derailing your writing flow. Think of it this way: you don't need to understand how air conditioning works — you just want heat in winter and cool air in summer.

Below is the mothership script that powers professional publishing projects. We drop it into a fresh folder, run it once, and we're ready to build PDFs. It scaffolds your entire project in seconds — index, frontmatter, main body, backmatter, assets folder — all pre-wired to compile into print-ready output. Copy, run, focus on writing instead of setup. We have similar setups for eBooks too.

#!/bin/bash

# Usage: ./newproj.sh project-name
# Creates a LaTeX project with index.tex, frontmatter.tex, main.tex, backmatter.tex

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 project-name"
exit 1
fi

PROJECT="$1"
mkdir -p "$PROJECT/assets"
cd "$PROJECT" || exit

# index.tex
cat > index.tex << 'EOF'
% index.tex
\\documentclass[12pt,oneside]{monolinebook}

...\\end{document}
EOF

echo "Project '$PROJECT' created with LaTeX scaffold."

Your whole project is scaffolded in this script. We never touch it again we just run it:

paua@shell:~$ chmod +x newproj.sh && ./newproj.sh thesis-project && cd thesis-project
paua@shell thesis-project:~$ tree

Every time we run it, we get:

thesis-project/
├── assets/
├── monoline.cls
├── index.tex
├── frontmatter.tex
├── main.tex
└── backmatter.tex

We drop monolinebook.cls or any class we’ve prepared alongside index.tex. Hold on… 30 seconds max. All files prefilled and ready to compile. Quick check with an editor in:

% index.tex
\documentclass{12pt,oneside}{monolinebook}

\title{The Monoline Whitepaper}
\author{Bazza Henderson, Chief Code Wrangler}
\date{\today}

\begin{document}
\maketitle
\tableofcontents

\include{frontmatter}
\include{main}
\include{backmatter}

\end{document}

% frontmatter.tex
\chapter*{Preface}
This whitepaper was not designed in InDesign.
It was built in seconds with tools that have outlived every SaaS fad so far.
Typography, layout, and logic — nothing hidden behind subscription walls.

\chapter*{Acknowledgments}
To the shell. To \LaTeX. To every old tool that still beats today’s shiny.

% main.tex
\chapter{Introduction}
Welcome to the Monoline Whitepaper.

We believe in using the right tools, not the most expensive ones.
This document is set in Alegreya, built with \LaTeX, and styled with
our own class file: \texttt{monolinebook.cls}.

\section{Why Not Adobe?}
Adobe sells rent, not publishing. Creative Cloud updates break more workflows
than they fix. Why pay $699+ per workstation per year for an app that takes
minutes to launch and crash mid-export?

\section{The Monoline Approach}
Instead, we use tools that last:
\begin{itemize}
\item \textbf{\LaTeX} for structure and typography
\item \textbf{Pandoc} for format conversion
\item \textbf{Ghostscript} for clean PDFs
\item \textbf{Fonts} that are older than half the apps you’ve installed
\end{itemize}

\subsection{Speed}
Try this in Word or any SaaS app:
\begin{verbatim}
mkdir project
cd project
touch index.tex frontmatter.tex main.tex backmatter.tex
mkdir assets
nano index.tex
\end{verbatim}

…and Bob's our uncle. Within minutes, a full publishing project is scaffolded. Document class, frontmatter, main body, assets folder — prefabricated, version-controlled, ready to ship. Compare that to clicking through InDesign menus, listening to a fan that sounds like a coughing lawn mower, and watching progress bars crawl across the screen like it’s still 1997. Rearranging chapters? No problem. We just move them from:

% frontmatter.tex
\chapter*{Preface}
This whitepaper was not designed in InDesign.
It was built in seconds with tools that have outlived every SaaS fad so far.
Typography, layout, and logic — nothing hidden behind subscription walls.

\chapter*{Acknowledgments}
To the shell. To \LaTeX. To every old tool that still beats today’s shiny.

to this:

% frontmatter.tex
\chapter*{Acknowledgments}
To the shell. To \LaTeX. To every old tool that still beats today’s shiny.
Oh, and when you wanna swap chapters chronology you just move them the way you want it.

\chapter*{Preface}
This whitepaper was not designed in InDesign.
It was built in seconds with tools that have outlived every SaaS fad so far.
Typography, layout, and logic — nothing hidden behind subscription walls.

A final run with lualatex index.tex or xelatex index.tex (if you have XeLaTeX-specific setups) ... and BOOM: branded PDF, headers in uppercase Monoline red, sections in blue, subsections in green. If you want them. Usually links stay black, because your bibliographer will scream at multicolored fonts or underlined links.

VALUE

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s pragmatism. No SaaS bill per desk. No rainbow wheel mid-export. No “update broke your workflow” drama. Just projects created in seconds, built on formats that never die, with fonts, margins, and headers set exactly how you want them.

The money saved on subscriptions? It gets re-invested: in typesetting that breathes, layouts that read easy, and actual human attention on your text — or directed into grassroots community work that matters to us. On top of that, 1% of every invoice sent through Stripe goes to their Non-Carbon initiative, funding permanent carbon-removal technologies. Instead of only cutting emissions, it helps pull existing CO₂ out of the air and build a scalable market for removal.