Hacker Wednesday 8/11 – FLOSS Manual CSS Remix

Christopher has been working on customizing his FLOSS Manuals stylesheet in SIGIL. He is focusing on issues specific to paged media, with a goal to make the book as visually interesting as possible without modifying the base HTML, staying true to the concept of separating style and content. As mentioned in an earlier blog post, his primary style elements are:

HTML Elements: h1, h2, h3, p, strong, code, ol, ul, li, blockquote, img

And the resulting output is as follows:



He encountered some technical considerations which has narrowed his font choices down to what works best in our current reality. His stylesheet now uses the fonts OCRA, Constantia, and Gentium – fonts that are readily available on the web and Windows Vista, respectively (we did find some useful instructions on how to install Windows Vista fonts on the Macintosh platform). At present, FLOSS Manuals and Booki do not appear to support custom stylesheets or the @font-face method, so we are hoping to achieve our desired look by combining our CSS/XHTML work in Sigil and processing it through PrinceXML. The experiment should be interesting, and will generate results that are more reader-friendly than the standard FLOSS Manuals output. One thing is for certain: we have learned a lot about what works and doesn’t work in the state-of-the-art of font embedding!

Right now, we are reading up on CSS Properties supported by Prince 7.0. We will post our ePub -> PDF experiment soon, and add more content to An eBook Revolution / eBook Enlightenment" by next Hacker Wednesday!

Hacker Wednesday 8/11 – Finalizing The Design

Greetings from #rdcHQ! The crew is finalizing the design with the goal to have a printed and bound version of our (e)Book for the RDC Launch Party this Labor Day Weekend when we demo our creations to our community … and, most importantly, we need to wrap up this phase of our project to support the first revision of James Simmons wonderful book!

The first order of business was to consider the feedback from the mailing lists that we sent our layouts to (IAEP and FLOSS Manuals Discuss).

Feedback was in favor of Cover 3, with comments such as “I have always been a fan of decoration on both sides of a text – helps to distinguish them no matter which way they are stacked” …

Cover 4 was praised as “very effective, with the engaging and thoughtful image on the front, and more concrete image on back.”

We are still considering which one to use. James has recommended that we finesse the title to reflect the cover selected. “E-book Enlightenment: Reading and Leading With One Laptop Per Child” supports the illustration of the reading boy, as the illustration is more reserved and introspective. The more dynamic visual of the flying book is more suited to the title, An eBook Revolution).

As the author states — “There is some precedent for changing a book to go with the cover art rather than changing the cover art to go with the book. F. Scott Fitzgerald did that with the Great Gatsby.

Oceana surprised us with some more wonderful illustrations – a set of illuminated drop caps in her eBook-ish style, and a wonderful new illustration for the “About The Authors” section:

Stay tuned …

“Writing Engaging Technical Documentation” by Anne Gentle

The Rural Design Collective’s recent work with eBooks was mentioned by author Anne Gentle in a blog post entitled “Writing Engaging Technical Documentation”:

Another way to incorporate images is to use artwork, however simple or stylistic. Take a look at this watercolor created by Oceana Rain Fields, a participant in this summer’s workshop at the Rural Design Collective web site. Illustration used under the CC Attribution 3.0 license (credited to Oceana Rain Fields with permission) …This image sticks with the readers of the manual, especially kids like the child-like figure shown. It should help the users identify with the manual (available online) and get cozy with it.

Neat! We met Anne during the course of this project – she kindly provided the cover templates Oceana is using on her FLOSS Manual cover layouts. And that is what is great about how the Internet works – folks helping each other out to make good things happen!

Anne asked permission to use our initial illustration that determined the visual style of our eBook – and we obliged! The licenses for the rest of the images will be determined on August 18th at #rdcHQ!

Hacker Wednesday 8/4 – Cover Layouts

Oceana completed the cover layouts this week for “An E-Book Revolution: Reading and Leading with One Laptop Per Child” (new title!) working in Inkscape using an .svg template supplied by the kind folks at FLOSS Manuals (we are currently collecting these templates in the Workspace section of our site)




We submitted these covers to the FLOSS Manuals Discuss and It’s An Education Project (IAEP) mailing list for review. Oceana will incorporate any changes into her layouts next week at RDC Headquarters!

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