[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

Also check out:

• Blitz eBook Framework
• CSS Boilerplate for eBooks
• Any CSS included in epubs uploaded by MR user GrannyGrump (she does a lot with very little)

One would think that, somewhere out there, somebody would have posted an elegant barebones ePub CSS file for novice book designers to base their work on. Try as I might, though, I haven't been able to find one.

There's a CSS sheet in every single published ePUB, right? Why not start there? Or, as others have pointed out, the Wiki here. OR, one of the thousands of ePUBs published here. That's how pretty much everyone here, and everyone in the business, learned.

Can anyone point me to such a thing? I'm looking for a minimal approach - maybe a hundred lines of code, max. I don't care if not every eventuality is catered for, in fact I'd see working under the constraints of something so simple to be a good discipline.

Well, unless you're talking about the world's simplest ePUB, it's going to be more than 100lines of code. You might also look for a Wayback Machine copy of the CSS Zen Garden, which had LOTS of CSS for a variety of ePUBs, and the developers of that cheerfully made it available for public consumption. You could also spend a few bucks and buy Liz Castro's "ePUB: Straight to the Point," which, while a teeny bit dated now, has all the essentials for learning the fundies of ePUB-building.

I would be looking for something that worked pretty much universally across platforms.

As DiapDealer explained, that's a Grail Quest--and really, it's more than that, you're Quixotically tilting at windmills. No such thing exists, because the retailers and device-makers and those who just HADDA make a new ePUB reader all created different readers, that respond differently to CSS. Apple's pretty big on ignoring the standards, and some of the nine bajillion software readers out there either completely ignore the CSS, or allow the end user to override it. Welcome to the joys of eBookmaking!

Unasked-for-comment: if you plan to use your ePUB for Kindle-building, don't use the Blitz CSS. You need a lot more experience under your belt to understand what's happening with all the inheritance functionality in that, and a lot of it will not work for MOBI and it certainly won't for KF7.

Paul (BBeBooks) does a very nice job, and his is likely the closest to what you'll want. I've worked with him and respect his work.

Hitch