Quote:
Originally Posted by dynabook
Could you give us a description of your methodology and tools you used? Did you use InDesign or a text editor? Or both? Thanks.
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Sure thing! I'm also planning to post some EPUB/ADE/CSS-for-books things I've learned in producing this when I have enough time to put together something coherent. (I've had this sitting around for quite some time and only posted now because I finished a casual final read-through.)
Tools: This is 100% hand-crafted markup and CSS, written in Emacs in nXML mode. I initially created the SVG cover in Inkscape but then re-did most of it by hand to work around shortcomings in the Adobe DE SVG renderer. I used a few Python scripts to help with things like "educating" the punctuation, generating the markup for the faux small-caps (ADE doesn't support CSS "font-variant"), and splitting the HTML into per-chapter files. I previewed the text primarily in Firefox, verified tricky bits look perfect in ADE & comprehensible in FBReader, and did a complete final read-through on the Reader.
Methodology: I'm not a trained designer, so I kind of bumbled through it, with some help from
http://webtypography.net/ and a minimalist aesthetic. I identified the elements needing detailed formatting (headings, verse, letters, etc), developed designs for them I thought fit well together, and implemented them directly in markup with styling which degrades cleanly when CSS isn't supported. Production work-flow was to filter the source plain-text through Python scripts which normalized punctuation and spacing and wrapped all text in basic markup, then apply specific markup with various Emacs automation features, and finally hand-apply/-tune markup for areas where the source-text was inconsistent.
Fonts: Bonus section! and me realizing that I should probably release an updated version which includes license terms for the fonts I embedded. The cover page uses TeX Gyre Adventor, an open source OpenType version of URW Gothic L (itself a version Avant Garde Gothic). The body text is in Adobe Caslon, which is not free in any sense -- alas, but no free font does it for me for the text of a book-length work.
HTH!