[FM Discuss] Using drop-caps in FLOSS Manuals

[Rebecca Hargrave Malamud]

  Greetings!

I would be happy to write a blog post about our fancy stylesheets. At 
the moment, I have a couple of deadlines competing for my attention ... 
timing it with the shipping of the Kickstarter rewards would probably 
work best for me (September 30th - first week of October).

Rebecca Malamud



On 9/24/10 7:05 AM, James Simmons wrote:
> Adam,
>
> I was thinking about that myself.  Maybe using a different font family
> for the first letter would be kind of neat too.  I'll be experimenting
> with this.
>
> The real experts on this kind of thing are Rebecca Malamud and Scotty
> Auble of the Rural Design Collective.  They are the ones who came up
> with the styled pages that will be used for their edition of the book.
>   My own experience with stylesheets is limited to corporate websites.
> Maybe they could be convinced to do a post on fancy stylesheets.
>
> James Simmons
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 11:39 PM, adam<adam at xs4all.nl>  wrote:
>> wowsa
>>
>> i put the css you suggested into objavi and rendered reading and sugar :
>> http://objavi.flossmanuals.net/books/ReadingandSugar-en-2010.09.24-06.34.29.pdf
>>
>> coool........
>>
>> could you use something like:
>> background-image:url('wallpaper.png');
>>
>> to make the background more interesting?
>>
>>
>> also...any chance of a blog post about this when you get some time
>> James?
>>
>> adam
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, 2010-09-23 at 16:18 -0500, James Simmons wrote:
>>> If you checked out the styled pages that the Rural Design Collective
>>> put together for my book you probably admired the drop caps that begin
>>> the first paragraph in each chapter.  I though these were done with
>>> image files but it turns out that you can do this with styles, like
>>> this:
>>>
>>> p.intro:first-letter {
>>>     display:block;
>>>     float:left;
>>>     border:3px solid #A64942;
>>>     padding:5px;
>>>     margin:4px 9px 4px 5px;
>>>     font-size:73px;
>>>     background-color: #FAD492;
>>>     font-style: normal;
>>>     color: #1C4501;
>>> }
>>>
>>> You need to make the first<p>  tag on the page have a class like this:
>>>
>>> <p class="intro">
>>>
>>> I was able to get the drop caps into my PDF using a custom style
>>> sheet.  I wanted them to be in my web page as well, so I used a
>>> <style>  tag to add the style at the top of the page.  The results can
>>> be seen here:
>>>
>>> http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/ReadingandSugar/Introduction
>>>
>>> If you run this through OBJAVI using the default style sheet the
>>> <style>  in the page is ignored when creating a PDF.  You need to use a
>>> custom style sheet with the drop cap style included.
>>>
>>> While this effect may not be suitable for every FM the book I'm doing
>>> is about e-books so it's kind of appropriate.  Any thoughts?
>>>
>>> James Simmons
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Discuss mailing list
>>> Discuss at lists.flossmanuals.net
>>> http://lists.flossmanuals.net/listinfo.cgi/discuss-flossmanuals.net
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Discuss mailing list
>> Discuss at lists.flossmanuals.net
>> http://lists.flossmanuals.net/listinfo.cgi/discuss-flossmanuals.net
>>
>