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 –

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.

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!