I'm not a big fan, but it does make me consider what it would take to make an ePub version of each issue. Anyone have any knowledge/experience related to HTML->ePub conversion?
Have a nice day, Jonathan On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 12:11 AM, Jonathan Rochkind <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm not sure, there are definitely some tricks there. > > But if you do come up with some CSS that works robustly (your rough cut demo > is doing some odd things, cutting text off in the middle of paragraphs, > putting scrollbars in the middle of the page, etc), we at the journal would > probably be happy to incorporate it in the main site as an option, perhaps a > link somewhere to toggle between a multi-narrow-column and single-column > view. A bit of WordPress hacking involved there too perhaps to provide such > CSS toggle functionality. > ________________________________________ > From: Code for Libraries [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Louis > St-Amour [[email protected]] > Sent: Thursday, December 23, 2010 10:23 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: [CODE4LIB] An alternate presentation of Code4Lib Journal > > Hey all, > > Having recently discovered Code4Lib Journal, I was fooling around with > columns as ways of making articles more interesting to read, perhaps > eventually on tablet devices: > > [image: AltPresentation.jpg] > > Works best in (and in fact only tested on) Google Chrome on an iMac, but you > can try it out for yourself at http://lsta.me/code4lib/ ... all I've done is > mirrored the journal site and added some styles to the bottom of the > WordPress theme's CSS file. In theory you could apply such styles via a web > browser extension or user stylesheet to the website itself, live. But I > wouldn't recommend it without further testing and tweaks. > > My main goal was to see if columns improved the reading experience on an > iPad, and the answer is definitely a "yes," because while I set the columns > too small, you still get a sense of where you are overall and can see > farther ahead with columns than when you zoom in on a single column webpage. > The trouble with automatic columns, however, are defining when the automatic > columns should break. So far, it's perhaps more trouble than it's worth in > CSS, but with any luck that might change 10 years from now. > > It's funny how tablets in particular break our notions of page -- on > tablets, we want essentially resizable and reflowing text columns but with > fixed and pretty "page" layouts that we can navigate through. Consider > magazines on the iPad -- sometimes we want the pretty text and images, but > other times we want just text alone, or just images alone. And yet that > means coming up with natural ways to zoom in on text and images without > making the text unreadable or images blurry. It should be possible, but as > far as I know, no one's done it right, yet. Either it's a Kindle-style text > experience, or a magazine-style Image experience. I wonder who will mix the > two together, first? Inkling almost gets it right with textbook content, but > often feels like it's wasting space with its one-column infinite scroll > approach. Which brings me back to my original point, I think columns and > grids are crucial for helping people see more info at once. > > Anyone else have any thoughts on this? I was thinking about turning the > Journal into an iPad/tablet app, given its Creative Commons license, but I > now suspect given my interest in columns, that I'd be laying it out in > InDesign first, like a real magazine, which might be too much work. > > > Louis. > -- Jonathan M. Brinley [email protected] http://xplus3.net/
