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!

Greetings from #rdcHQ!

This week, Christopher Garcia joins the crew at RDC Headquarters. He hit the ground running with some super ideas and immediately got up to speed on FLOSS Manuals and the fundamental building blocks of the eBook: HTML (XHTML) and CSS. We began our exploration of the eBook by breaking out of the content management system (CMS) at FLOSS Manuals so we can strictly focus on design. Scotty downloaded a local copy of the HTML/CSS and images, and uploaded it to our UI Lab so we could all begin experimenting. We broke this file down further into key pages and page elements that recur in the book design. These are listed in the table below:

Chris’s challenge is to write a new CSS file using the current document structure already in use at FLOSS Manuals. This will require some iteration with the individual key page files and the global HTML file* until we achieve the best visual result. Once that is complete, we will test our custom CSS using the FLOSS Manuals REMIX function. It should be interesting and educational – and exciting to see how it all translates when run through FLOSS Manual’s custom PDF generator, OBJAVI.

*Please note that our HTML file is for design and testing purposes only and will be deleted at the end of this exercise. The current version of Reading and Leading with Sugar is available at FLOSS Manuals.

Last week: Hacker Wednesday 7/7 – Cover Art

Last week, we had a strictly visual Hacker Wednesday. Oceana brought in her art tools and dazzled us with her ability – and determined the visual style for the illustrations for the book.

She has chosen a loose natural style that makes the book seem “less nerdy” (in the words of the author) and brings together the color palette of the FLOSS Manuals site and the OLPC XO quite effectively.

Now that the visual direction is determined, she is working with Christopher to establish the look and feel of the entire book – starting with a color palette based on her illustration (at right). Christopher and Oceana are already brainstorming ways to break up the book with illustrations and her palette. Creating graphics for the section headings based on the drawing could be a very effective way to add visual flair to the book and we are going to explore that idea next week.

One thing is certain: we have no shortage of talent or interesting projects at #rdcHQ this year!

Great work, team!