Tag Archives: CSS

Leading-Trim destroying traditional typography

Skilled Workman Posted on by

Leading-Trim destroying traditional typography seems a strange way to start an article on typography. But for the sake of Web developers, who are commonly typographic illiterates, they are toying with changing the historic basis of paragraph spacing, and all line spacing. What set me off is an article I read this morning in Medium, a magazine with which I was unfamiliar. The head and subhead are: Leading-Trim: The Future of Digital Typesetting How an emerging CSS standard … Continue reading →

Writing and working in InDesign makes using it easy

Skilled Workman Posted on by

I was talking to a friend a couple days ago. He mentioned the primary trouble he has in using InDesign to format his books: when he gets into InDesign he can’t remember how to use it. Suddenly, it dawned on me that this is a primary reason why writing in InDesign is so effective. Not only is writing fully formatted in InDesign the best method of communicating clearly with your readers [outside of excellent content], the simple act … Continue reading →

InDesign CC 2014 offers excellent fixed layout ePUBs

Skilled Workman Posted on by

This is probably the big news for InDesign CC 2014. Although there have been many improvements to Reflowable ePUBs, they are incremental. The ePUB FXL has the possibility of being almost revolutionary. So, how big is this change? It is very hard to show the differences because the layouts are so different. But, let’s look at two examples where I did the best I could to get the same content side by side. In this small-sized screen … Continue reading →

Books, even ebooks, need good tools (InDesign CS6)

Skilled Workman Posted on by

No! You can’t do it in BBEdit or Word It all comes back to the print/ebook divide. That divide is only apparent to the book designers. For the readers, a book is a book. Ebooks are cheaper (or should be). Normal printed books are high resolution, typographic marvels. But to the reader, a book is a book. For authors, publishing only a print version or only an ebook version is worse than silly—it’s foolish. If you want … Continue reading →

Writers designing their own books in InDesign? Of course!

Skilled Workman Posted on by

I posted last week about the dangers of allowing your ebook to degenerate into a Website. After all, “An ebook is just encapsulated HTML & CSS.” It was basically a plea to design your ebooks in InDesign. I missed making my core point. I wasn’t saying that code geeks cannot design ebooks. I was saying that most coders are not designers, but technicians. One of my commenters (Tom) suggested that writers are just as bad as coding … Continue reading →

Forcing InDesign to write acceptable CSS

Skilled Workman Posted on by

Sometimes I feel so stupid. The solution to the incomplete CSS in exported ePUBs is so much more simple than I thought. Your mind just seems to turn a little corner and the solution pops up in front of you. My beef with InDesign CS5.5’s ePUBs was the need to edit the CSS I’ve posted several times here and published a couple books about fixing the ePUB CSS. What I wrote was accurate. It’s not difficult, as … Continue reading →

I just added CSS editing instructions to the free ePUB design booklet

Skilled Workman Posted on by

There is nothing long and extended here, because I remain convinced that most book designers consider coding anathema. But after finding the script I mentioned earlier today, I have found several interesting things that can be easily fixed in the ePUB. Edit the CSS if you can (or don’t if you can’t) The problem with this has been the difficulty with decompressing the .epub file and then recompressing back into .epub. For that you will need a … Continue reading →