Another clean, minimalist style from Reece Dunn, with a nice use of small-caps:
Adding small caps to only the first line of a chapter:
#content > p.noindent:first-line
{
font-variant: small-caps;
}
where #content is the containing block that holds the ebook.
Apropos of the Harlequin announcement of Carina Press, I’ve compiled this list of DRM-free publishers.
I asked about this on Twitter once and eventually stumbled on this great list of scifi, fantasy and romance publishers who distribute DRM-free books. I haven’t validated the list and don’t know if all are still in business.
But I also [...]
This is the first in a series of posts describing some of the lesser-known features in the ePub spec. Many of them aren’t implemented by any readers, yet, but can provide some interesting functionality.
The first is “fallbacks.” As ePub developers know, only a small handful of content types are supported by the spec: [...]
Mike Cane hates ebook indexes. He’s right — that kind of index is worse than none at all.
I happen to believe a good search feature is valuable and in some cases can replace an editorial index (for example, if the requested term is infrequent in the text). But if a publisher spent the money [...]
Most of the time, command-line users will be able to run the epubcheck Java binary without issues. But sometimes mysterious problems occur — this happened to me on OS X before upgrading to Snow Leopard. So while it’s a bit awkward, you can use the remote epubcheck API combined with some XSLT to [...]
I wrote these to automate a really common task: zip up an ePub (properly) and validate it. It expects a local install of epubcheck.
Install these functions in your .bash_profile. This should work on any Unix-like system including OS X.
Zip up an ePub file
function epub()
{
rm -f $@; zip -q0X $@ mimetype; zip -qXr9D $@ *
}
Call this [...]
Since these technology areas are relatively new I thought I’d point to some of the resources that have been supremely valuable to me in developing an offline web app:
Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
by Jonathan Stark
By a happy coincidence this in-progress book from O’Reilly is running on the Open Feedback Publishing System I [...]
Our web tool for using the open-source epubcheck validator got a quick refresh:
Now includes epubpreflight results
EpubCheck’s lesser-known companion checks for additional issues like content documents that exceed 300K, which can’t be loaded on the Sony Reader. The complete (short!) list:
Content files that are empty or are >300k
Image files that are empty or are >10MB [...]
Thank you to Reece Dunn for this nice use of CSS typography and generous white space:
I was extremely pleased to participate in the Internet Archive’s BookServer announcement and press event. (The Register has the best coverage, but also see CNET and ReadWriteWeb).
Our part of this open ecosystem is Ibis Reader, an in-development digital reading system for a range of internet devices that provides access to books both online and offline. [...]