[FM Discuss] UI Challenge

[James Simmons]

Adam,

Rather than make the interface more elaborate I'd like to have some
simple (I hope) things:

1).  A more reasonable default style sheet.  The one we have uses
really big fonts for titles, sections, TOC, and really small ones for
content.  It also makes a lot of stuff ALL CAPS  when it really should
not.  The style sheet I'm putting together for MYOSA might be the
basis for a reasonable default, and it uses the same fonts that
Collaborative Futures uses.

2).  More reasonable default behavior for page breaks.  A heading (h2,
h3) should never be left at the bottom of a page with the section
following it on the next page.  A table should not be split across
pages if it can be avoided.  On the other hand a list of bullets CAN
be split across pages.

3).  The style sheet for the web version of an FM should treat
preformatted text like the PDF does.  Right now if a line is too long
on the web it wraps to the next line, but in the PDF it gets
truncated.  If the text was truncated in pretty much the same place on
the web as it would be in the PDF with the default PRE font (Courier
12 pts please) then code examples could be formatted on the web and it
would be reasonably likely that they would be good in the PDF
generated with the default styles.

On my second book I have the services of a talented artist and people
who are really interested in book design.  On MYOSA I didn't have that
and didn't think I would need it.  I was hoping that OBJAVI would be
like LyX, where you don't really get to design how your pages will
look but they come out looking great anyway.

James Simmons



On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 11:42 AM, adam hyde <adam at flossmanuals.net> wrote:
> okedoke....
>
>
> so, the series of challenge posts asking for help with css, python, js
> etc has been really super. we have solved a lot of things this way with
> advice and help from the community (thats you :)
>
> so...big big thanks to everyone that has come to the assistance of booki
> through these mails :)
>
> so...i thought i would take this a step further and put rather a bigger
> challenge on the table. I have stepped back and observed how Booki has
> been used for pdf design - seeing how people (ie. Mushon and the RDC)
> are solving these issues. There has been some pretty cool things come
> out of this. Mushon in particular has been very active on the dev list
> (http://lists.flossmanuals.net/listinfo.cgi/booki-dev-flossmanuals.net)
> and helped us work out a lot of issues AND he has made some big strides
> forward with experimenting with CSS and book design using Booki/Objavi
>
> RDC and James are also doing great exploratory work in this area as you
> have seen through the posts to the list.
>
> One thing that strikes me, is that I think we need to consider providing
> an interface to assist people design pdf using the booki export tab...