Hacker Wednesday 8/11 – FLOSS Manual CSS Remix
- August 14th, 2010
- By rdcHQ
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!