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!