Comments on: ePub Zen Garden aims to keep your E-books from looking atrocious

ePub Zen Garden aims to keep your E-books from looking atrocious

joeclark — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:16:39 -0800

Do your E-books look atrocious? They don't have to. Liza Daly's new ePub Zen Garden project does for electronic books what CSS Zen Garden did for the Web – demonstrate that typography and layout of E-books are easily altered and, quite possibly, beautiful and usable.

(The ePub E-book format is, in fact, XHTML 1.1 + CSS, so the techniques underlying the ePub and CSS Zen Gardens are almost identical.)

By: cjorgensen

cjorgensen — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:24:10 -0800

Way cool. See also, Kindle Formatting for Web Geeks First link supposed to go here?

By: Toekneesan

Toekneesan — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:33:36 -0800

I found Springtime and Swiss readable but gads, are Noir and Wallpaper really good examples of electronic type style?

By: cjorgensen

cjorgensen — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:39:55 -0800

I liked Noir the best. And while readable, I found Swiss to be ugly and boring, and I didn't mind Wallpaper either. But I am so not a designer.

By: Artw

Artw — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:42:19 -0800

Sounds good. I've heard some bad stories about eBooks being seen as the place content goes to die, and just having text shovelled on to them.

By: fuzzypantalones

fuzzypantalones — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:46:21 -0800

Swiss seems too heavy and dense for reading online for an extended period of time, if how it looks in a browser is how it looks on a kindle.

By: joeclark

joeclark — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:48:41 -0800

Um, yes, cjorgensen. Typo.

By: nev

nev — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:58:41 -0800

I'm the creator. These aren't meant to be best practices or even necessarily to anyone's taste. I asked four designers to contribute (I'm an engineer) and this is the result. The audience for the project are publishers who thus far have only dealt with limited formats like Mobipocket. Many publishers are totally unaware of CSS, don't understand that ePub is very much HTML, and don't realize they can pressure e-reader manufacturers to improve support for style and typography. Like the original CSS Zen Garden, I strongly encourage designers and type geeks to submit new styles for inclusion.

By: 3.2.3

3.2.3 — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:05:46 -0800

(The ePub E-book format is, in fact, XHTML 1.1 + CSS, so the techniques underlying the ePub and CSS Zen Gardens are almost identically broken.)

By: joeclark

joeclark — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:16:43 -0800

Oh, I wouldn't go that far, Three-dot-Two-dot-Three. You were hoping for CSS3 columns module?

By: smackfu

smackfu — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:26:00 -0800

For ebooks, 99% of the format is the font choice.

By: Blazecock Pileon

Blazecock Pileon — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:35:11 -0800

Thanks for taking the time to comment, nev.

By: Thorzdad

Thorzdad — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:51:40 -0800

For ebooks, 99% of the format is the font choice. That's pretty much true about any book, electronic or paper. Typography, as it applies to a book, should not draw attention to itself. Rather, it should compliment and assist the flow of the text.

By: joeclark

joeclark — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:51:50 -0800

And 99% of the other 1% is text-align and line-height. Just as in printed books.

By: asfuller

asfuller — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:42:40 -0800

If good CSS is the key, I'm curious as to why they use px -sized text instead of -em sized.

By: Talez

Talez — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:54:49 -0800

Eucalyptus for iPhone uses proper fonts, proper justified layouts and proper typography (hyphenation!) and includes Project Gutenburg (sp?) as an app store of sorts. I can't wait to get to work so I can check this project out.

By: anotherpanacea

anotherpanacea — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:30:48 -0800

I like the site, but I think my favorite thing about it is that it uses Middlemarch as the sample text and the whole thing appears to be there to read! Way better than a Project Gutenberg text file. God I love the internet.