Christopher downloaded SIGIL this week, a WYSIWYG ePub editor, and began working with the CSS for “Reading and Leading with Sugar” (now called “An E-Book Revolution”). SIGIL has a flexible GUI with multiple views: Book View, Code View and Split View, and has provided the most flexible interface to date to work with ePubs.

To work with SIGIL, we downloaded the latest version of “Reading and Leading with Sugar” from "OBJAVI, the FLOSS Manuals PDF Publisher." We also had to expand our search for open font libraries that support the @font-face method, including Fontspring and Google font directory. Chris also began incorporating Oceana’s section illustrations into the HTML document (as seen below).

The goal of this exercise is two-fold. We want to create a completely customized version of our own design. We are also working with the author to provide screenshots on the Macintosh platform to enhance “Reading and Leading with Sugar” (now called “An E-Book Revolution” ).

James Simmons joined us remotely for our Hacker Wednesday session, and Oceana presented the new cover art and a dozen new illustrations for the interior of the book. Shown below is the proposed new cover illustration –

This illustration is currently © Oceana Rain Fields … check back August 18th!

On August 18th, we will have a session on Creative Commons licenses at #rdcHQ, and at that time, Oceana will select licenses for all of her illustrations to be used in “Reading and Leading with Sugar” … but, it won’t be called that much longer – we have a new title in the works that will begin circulating on our FLOSS Manual mockups next week!

The final design of the book will take shape in August – it is great to work with such a talented group of people at #rdcHQ this year!

Christopher has been hard at work learning the fundamentals of CSS as it relates to book design. We set up a sandbox for him at #rdcHQ so he could work with Typekit to incorporate a broader range of typefaces in his design:

Work in progress in Christopher’s Sandbox; text from “Reading and Leading with Sugar” by author James Simmons

He is making good progress; working to understand CSS from the ground up. We are trying to achieve a balance between the printed page and the screen. We chose Typekit initially because of its web-only font linking license and buy-in from folks who make their living designing typefaces. We will, however, be taking a look at other alternatives including Cufon and Open Font Library over the coming week.

The FLOSS Manuals team also shared a link to a CSS file that is under development for PDF generation. We will be exploring that file this week to see what we can learn from it. We will be checking out Sigil, a WYSIWYG ebook editor, designed to work with ePubs to help us master the CSS/HTML > PDF/EPUB conversion.

Christopher also has a groovy extra credit project he is working on and he has been experimenting with open source tools over at his own site — Stay tuned!

This week at #rdcHQ, we began our first focused efforts on developing case studies for “Reading and Leading with Sugar.” Author James Simmons has asked the eBooks project team to test many of the examples in the book on the Macintosh, so we have decided to devote the last hour of Hacker Wednesdays to this task. We plan to test some other platforms as well to fully support the book, and provide testing of the final products themselves – the eBooks we create – on the XO.

We started with two very basic examples in PDF generation – converting your own documents to a PDF and creating scans of book images to an image container PDF (which is relevant to two chapters: "Making PDFs" and "Making CBZs").

The first exercise was fairly straightforward as outlined in the book –

Creating a PDF using OpenOffice

The second exercise resulted in the discovery that creating image container PDFs on the Mac is extraordinarily simple using sequentially numbered images and the built-in application known as Preview.

An image container PDF created using Preview

In short, sequentially ordered scans can be opened in Preview and saved as an image container PDF using the “Print To PDF” function in the Print dialog box. This is similar to CutePDF Writer for Windows, and perfect for books with a limited number of pages (simply open a directory full of images and “Print to PDF”). Lengthy books would require a great deal of RAM using this method, so one of the alternative methods mentioned in the book would be more suitable. We will test these as well, and add our discoveries to “Reading and Leading with Sugar.”

Demystifying Book Design

Oceana and Christopher continue to make progress on the design. We have added a project roadmap to the Workspace 2010 section of our site to keep the second half of our program focused on completing our project! Next week, we are going to work on designing to specification, embedding fonts for web and print, and finalizing our design using open source tools!*

Kudos to both of our mentees who are working hard to learn tools that were completely new to them at the outset of the program!