New to CSS

[John123]

Hi All,

Up until now I have not used CSS on my work, for the simple reason to keep everything clean and accessible to most Ebook readers. I now understand this to be incorrect and that most devices will interpret CSS successfully.

Can anyone point me in the direction of good tutorials in CSS? Or are there good ebook templates available.

My books are pretty simple affairs which will have, usually: Chapter Number, Chapter Title, full out and indented paragraphs and line spaces to denote timeline breaks within chapters.

Sometimes they may also include: Chapter Subheading, A, B and C subheads, Extracts and Poetry.

I do understand CSS in its most basic form but when it comes to div, span, class etc. I am a complete beginner.

I am a "one-man-band" and do get paid, very badly it must be said, so this is a commercial venture, I will understand any reticence on anyone's part to help. But, at the end of the day, we are all, I think, interested in making ebooks as nice and accessible as possible ... correct me if I'm wrong.

Anyway, guys and gals, thanking you all in advance.

John.

[Pablo]

W3Schools tutorial http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_intro.asp.
Good luck

[HYPE]

Hi John,

I would personally recommend picking up a book on HTML & CSS. I haven't looked at w3schools' tutorial on CSS, but a general advice would be to stay as far as possible from that site. From what I've saw and read from others, they often teach bad habits.

I can't recommend any book though, because the one that I've used wasn't in English.

Edit : Now that I think about it, buying a book on HTML & CSS for the sole purpose of making ebooks would probably be overkill, especially time-wise. In this case, I would recommend something more like this tutorial. It's free and seems very high quality.

[Turtle91]

Hype, thank you. I'll take a look at those videos. Free is always good!

I am surprised to hear you think W3schools teaches bad habits. They are pretty much the only site I've used (they're free too). Well, I mostly use just their reference pages which explain each command and how to use it. I have read through their tutorials once, but didn't notice any bad habits - at least that I'm aware of...

What bad habits are you referring to??

[AlexBell]

I've used HTML, XHTML, & CSS by Elizabeth Castro for years - from when I dabbled in webdesign - and found it very helpful. She has a later book, EPUB Straight to the Point which is also very helpful even though it has an emphasis on iBooks and InDesign, and is a little out of date now. Another shorter book is Teach Yourself CSS in 10 minutes, by Russ Weakley

I found what skills I had in designing websites directly applicable to designing ebooks, and am very glad I had that background.

[John123]

Hi All,

Thanks for the info.

One other thing; am I better keeping books to "web safe" serif fonts: Times, Palatino and Georgia. Or is using, say, Baskerville, Plantin, Bembo, etc. risky? Would some devices use fallback to a web safe serif font?

Cheers,

John.

[Pablo]

Originally Posted by John123

Hi All,

Thanks for the info.

One other thing; am I better keeping books to "web safe" serif fonts: Times, Palatino and Georgia. Or is using, say, Baskerville, Plantin, Bembo, etc. risky? Would some devices use fallback to a web safe serif font?

Cheers,

John.

If you want to use a particular font in your book, you have to embed it in the book.

Font embedding is not a good idea anymore, as many readers have user-selectable fonts these days. Embedding a font for the body text will usually disable this feature.

Font embedding is useful when used for titles, letters, newspaper clips, etc., that is, when you want to differentiate a portion of text from the main text of the book.