Back Matter
Colophon
A colophon records how a book was made. This one records what the book is set in, how it is produced, and why its cover looks the way it does.
This handbook is dedicated to the patient work of finding one’s way.
The cover
Its cover bears a homing pigeon, a domestic pigeon descended from the rock dove, selectively bred for the remarkable ability to return home across great distances. Long before satellite navigation, digital maps, or autonomous vehicles, these birds carried messages by solving a problem that remains central to every mobile robot: determine where you are, understand where you need to go, and navigate reliably through an imperfect, changing world.
The pigeon was chosen not only for navigation, but for what navigation is ultimately for. A map is more than a geometric model of lanes, boundaries, elevations, signs, landmarks, and trajectories. It is a shared representation that allows a vehicle to locate itself, anticipate its surroundings, and make a safe, comprehensible path through the world. In that sense, an HD map is an engineered form of orientation: a way to turn sensing into place, and place into purposeful motion.
The choice also acknowledges the tradition of technical books whose covers feature animals: distinctive, curious, and occasionally apt companions to difficult subjects. Bats suggest ranging and perception; falcons suggest speed; bees suggest collective intelligence. But the homing pigeon belongs especially to localization. It evokes return-to-base, route memory, resilient navigation, and the quiet persistence of a system that keeps seeking its reference frame.
No map is permanent, no sensor is perfect, and no vehicle navigates alone. The work described in these pages depends on surveyors, geospatial practitioners, roboticists, safety engineers, software developers, road operators, standards bodies, and the many people who make the physical world legible to machines.
May this book help its readers build maps, and systems, that know where they are, understand where they are going, and, when conditions become uncertain, can still find their way home.
Photo by Emre Yaşar from Pexels.
Typefaces
Libre Franklin
Headers and display
The book’s structural voice: part titles, chapter heads, and everything that announces a turn. A libre revival of Franklin Gothic, the American grotesque Morris Fuller Benton drew in the early 1900s and named after Benjamin Franklin.
Roboto Flex
Body text
The reading workhorse, set for long stretches without drawing attention to itself. Drawn by Christian Robertson as Google’s system face in 2011; the Flex cut adds weight and optical-size axes so one font file spans captions and display alike.
Libre Baskerville
Serif accents
Reserved for moments of ceremony: the cover, the title page, the dedication. A libre revival of the face John Baskerville cut in Birmingham in 1757, the transitional serif that made the printed page cleaner than the pen.
JetBrains Mono
Labels and code
Coordinates, tags, file paths, and everything that needs to be exact rather than elegant. Drawn for JetBrains in 2020 by Philipp Nurullin, a code face designed for the screen from the start rather than adapted from print.
How it is made
- Astro for the build: the book is generated from plain text sources, with no client framework in the way.
- Tailwind CSS v4 for styling, driven by the Veer design tokens.
- Shiki for syntax highlighting, themed to the Veer palette rather than a stock theme.
- Markdown for the chapters themselves, with custom remark plugins for the book’s callouts and external-link policy.
- Hand-drawn SVG for the diagrams. Every Harbor Yard illustration was drawn for the page it sits on.
Where it lives
The book is published at veerautonomous.com. The book has no print edition. When one exists, its printing history will be recorded in its own colophon.
Growing in public
The book is written in tranches, and the table of contents always shows what is written against what is planned. If a chapter reads like a first edition, it probably is one: report the error through the contact page and it becomes part of the next revision.