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!

Greetings from RDC Headquarters! Yesterday, we had our first remote working session and got accustomed to working with Google Wave, which we chose as our collaborative tool this year. Oceana shared the design concepts she has been working on with author James Simmons, and everyone got a primer on how to use our handy scanner, the HP ScanJet 4670.

Photos of #rdcHQ by Levi Thompson

Historically, we have used this scanner to digitize a collection of manuals published by Kodak circa 1920 that were produced for camera enthusiasts of the day. “Kodakery” still has several interesting articles that are relevant to amateur photographers, and we will use this collection to examine matters of scanning production and copyright at RDC Headquarters this summer.

The scanner, of course, is not just for digitizing objects – it is a creative tool that can be used in art creation and production, and we will explore this technique next week as we continue to brainstorm cover designs for “Reading and Leading with Sugar.”

Hacker Wednesday 6/23

Last week, the team defined the content and design elements of the book. We are approaching the manual as an exercise in eBook design and production. Although the software at FLOSS Manuals automates a lot of this, every good designer should understand how the process works in the event that they want to have more control over the visual aesthetic. Oceana broke down the book’s design into five key visual elements: cover page, table of contents, section page, text page (with and without illustrations), and acknowledgments - and created thumbnail sketches based on those elements. She then created mockups of one interior page and the cover in Inkscape and shared them with the project team on Google Wave. We will post these mockups on the website once James and Oceana determine that they are complete.

The next step in this exercise is to break down the individual pages further to define the CSS elements that need to be styled, and then create mock-ups in code. Next week, we will determine who will begin to bring our layouts to life with the addition of fresh faces at RDC Headquarters.

Stay tuned!

The Rural Design Collective had our first Hacker Wednesday this week! We spent most of our time setting up our workstations at RDC Headquarters and getting everyone virtually connected.

We also reviewed our schedule for the summer, and everyone got a copy of “Reading and Leading with Sugar” to read by next week. Anyone can read the book in progress at FLOSS Manuals … James Simmons gave us our first official task of brainstorming some ideas for a title and coming up with designs for a cover! We have a very strong visual design team this year, so this is right up our alley.

Next week when we regroup, we will test several of the technical examples in the book, as well as contribute a few of our own. We haven’t had the opportunity to build our own scanner yet (although it is definitely on our Extra Credit list of things we want to do), but we do have 1TB of raw book page scans at our disposal so we can hit the ground running on the PDF-generation side of things in the RDC Lab. We also have some materials earmarked for scanning that provide an opportunity to work with the details surrounding determination of copyright, which is important if you are interested in contributing scanned materials to the public domain.

We do have a few production details to iron out – the goal is to make this book available in as many formats as possible for download on the web, and making it aesthetically pleasing in the process. Fortunately, we love a challenge at #rdcHQ!