(Part of a new series of reviews of interactive digital fiction)
Meanwhile is a branched-storyline comic written and illustrated by Jason Shiga, originally published as a printed book. Interactive game developer Andrew Plotkin designed and coded the iOS version, available on the iOS App Store [iTunes link]. While I’ve seen the print edition, my first experience [...]
Over on his own blog, Ned Batchelder has written up his HTML5 appcache validator tool he whipped together while working on Ibis Reader:
The result is Caveman, a Python tool to validate HTML5 cache manifests. It scrapes the HTML page you specify, finding resources, then compares them to the cache manifest and reports problems.
Full blog post [...]
HTML5 is a wild grab-bag of technologies. One of the lesser-known bits at the bottom of the bag is the drag and drop API. This allows you to physically drag files from your computer into a browser page, and have the browser do something with the file (typically upload it).
If you’re logged in to [...]
EPUB 3 is tricky to experiment with today. Like any brand-new specification, there aren’t many of the resources we often take for granted, from books to software to validation tools. However, if you’re already comfortable getting your hands dirty you can get meaningful validation for your EPUB 3 documents now. In the future, we’ll probably [...]
I presented at Digital Book World 2011 about using EPUB3 to produce multimedia and interactive ebooks that will be compatible with multiple devices and software ereaders.
Anyone who’s ever been to a digital publishing conference knows that there is always a bewildering array of products that create and display enhanced content: ebooks that contain video, audio, [...]
iBooks now supports an extension to EPUB that allows publishers to create books with precise layout using CSS. This is Apple’s own extension, not part of the EPUB specification itself (and not one that they suggested be included in EPUB3).
The goal of this post is to simply document the extension and show how to create [...]
(You may be interested in the earlier article, When to embed fonts in ePub files.)
Font selection
Font formats and licensing are complicated. The ePub specification recommends that book designers and reading system implementers use OpenType fonts when possible (although TrueType fonts remain more common). If your font ends in a .otf extension, it’s an OpenType font. [...]
Geeks love raw data, so I couldn’t resist a text dump of all #toc tweets that occurred during the conference.
Here’s the quick visualization I threw together (warning, it loads very slowly):
It skips any images that are broken or any that were listed as having the Twitter default icon. For some reason the raw data [...]