[FM Discuss] MYOSA cover art

[James Simmons]

Tell Oceana I like all her art.  I was taken with the detailed drawing
she did of the XO and I think it's good that it only uses two colors.
It looks like Lulu covers work better with as few colors as possible.
If she did this illustration without the book but adding the "ear"
that got chopped it might work.  Don't worry about the author name;
FLOSS Manuals don't put the author names on the cover.

It is not important to me that the covers of the two books look alike.
 If that's something that she would prefer as the artist that's OK by
me.  If she has her own ideas about what the cover should be that's OK
too.  The book is about writing programs that will run on the XO
laptop.  Any recognizable drawing of the laptop itself would be
enough, really, with a limited number of colors.  Think Gauguin, if
Tahiti got a shipment of XO's.

James Simmons


On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Rebecca Hargrave Malamud
<webchick at invisible.net> wrote:
> Hi, James -
>
>>OBJAVI uses HTML style sheets as an optional parameter.
>
> Yes - I have been experimenting with the exact same feature for a couple of
> weeks now, with mixed results.
>
> Our font information simply is not coming through - and your PDF experiment
> was not using anything that resembled Century Gothic. I think perhaps the
> Booki custom CSS feature is not cooked yet. Did you look at the open bugs in
> the booki trac?
>
> Oceana is interested in doing the cover for MYOSA. She wants to know if you
> want the illustration to resemble "E-book Evolution" so that your books have
> a similar style, or should she make it look like the rough Inkscape image in
> the link you pointed to:
>
> http://ruraldesigncollective.org/mosh/nother_coverrr.pdf
>
> I have attached a screenshot if you cannot open the PDF.
>
> Regards,
>
> Rebecca Malamud
>
>
>
>
>
> James Simmons wrote:
>>
>> Rebecca,
>>
>> I don't know that it is stripped out so much as not put in to begin
>> with.  OBJAVI uses HTML style sheets as an optional parameter.  See
>> the attached image.  You can replace this style sheet with your own to
>> change the look of the generated PDF.  This is what I've been fooling
>> around with.  I have not attempted to change the PDF after the fact,
>> and would not want to as I'll need to modify the pages at the source
>> to get the <PRE> tagged stuff to fit on the page using a larger font.
>>
>> I'll be spending most of this evening making these corrections.  I
>> have a decent style sheet in the page in lulu.zip.  I'm hoping to get
>> a real artist to make a better one, but this one will do.
>>
>> Did you talk to Oceana about cover art for MYOSA?
>>
>> James Simmons
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 4:45 PM, Rebecca Hargrave Malamud
>> <webchick at invisible.net> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Hello, James -
>>>
>>> We're not seeing the CSS changes you describe using Objavi - when we
>>> download the transformed PDF from the link below, all of the styling
>>> information is stripped out. I experienced this same phenomenon a couple
>>> of
>>> weeks ago when I tried to upload our custom-designed ePub to generate a
>>> PDF.
>>>
>>> As I understand it, Booki does not support @font-face or embedded fonts -
>>> these bugs are reported in the Booki trac -
>>>
>>> http://booki-dev.flossmanuals.net/report/1?asc=0&sort=ticket
>>>
>>> As it stands right now, the Rural Design Collective will be using
>>> PrinceXML
>>> to convert our custom-designed PDF to make sure it looks the way
>>> Christopher
>>> designed it.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Rebecca Malamud
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> James Simmons wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> I have made a stab at doing an improved style sheet for "Make Your Own
>>>> Sugar Activities!" to get the fonts in the printed book to a readable
>>>> size.  What I've done is to change the font size of both normal and
>>>> formatted text to 12pt, remove the style that translated headings to
>>>> all upper case, and changed the font family to Century Gothic.  To get
>>>> the code listings to fit using 12 pt Courier I'm going to have to
>>>> print out all the pages and very carefully re-wrap lines that get
>>>> truncated.  I will start on that tonight.  The results I'm getting so
>>>> far are here:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> http://objavi.flossmanuals.net/books/ActivitiesGuideSugar-en-2010.08.24-21.20.26.pdf
>>>>
>>>> If you're thinking about taking the MYOSA CSS challenge this is what
>>>> you'd have to compete with.  I'm pretty well sold on using 12 pt
>>>> courier for the code samples, plus 12 pt font for the Normal text.
>>>> The rest of the styles are up for grabs.
>>>>
>>>> James Simmons
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>
>