I guess I should get my butt in gear before the New Years Eve party, but I'm feeling kind of worn out. I have, however, been thinking again about the publication/layout tutorials I promised, along with the EPUB zines. The zines are slowed because I'm tinkering with content. I'm tinkering with it so much, I think I'll do a simple EPUB beforehand, so I can use it as the basis of the tutorial. I'll grab some posts I should really collect together for ease of use, edit them, and use them as sample documents. I'm thinking the posts on traps would be a good start, plus I'll probably do some kind of dungeon module as another example.
Why the focus on EPUB? I plan on ranting about that some time in the future. I'll talk about layout for PDF, too, eventually, but unless I discover something in the next few days, I think I've decided to do all the ebook versions of stuff I distribute as EPUB. This will probably shock some people, because there's a huge unwarranted bias towards PDF in the RPG community. Among other things, I think a lot of people don't know that there are free EPUB readers for desktop computers, as well as for tablets and ereaders.
And a lot of people don't realize that an EPUB is actually just a ZIP file. The text content is XHTML, the formatting is CSS. It's not really that scary. Sure, there are some extra XML files in there, but if you are just trying to get at the content and don't want to get a free ereader like calibre, you could just unzip the EPUB and ignore the extras; they are just there for indexing and other features that make the ZIP behave like an EPUB.
I think that EPUB is a great format for e-books. It may wreak havoc with layouts designed for static dimensions (eg. paper sizes for print), but its flexibility is well-suited to the variety of devices and software out there.
ReplyDeleteI've been using the EPUBReader plugin for Mozilla to read them on my laptop if I'm not using my e-reader. I found Calibre a bit heavy-handed with cataloguing and so on.
If you want an easy way create an EPUB, check out Sigil (free/OSS). If you're using linux check here instead. Sigil has modes for WYSIWYG and html editing.
Actually, the methods I'm going to focus on in tutorials are centered on Pandoc, because it is free, multiplatform, and can produce multiple formats from one source document. And I just recently found a tool for the Windows platform that I want to test that links Pandoc, OpenOffice, and a converter for the Kindle format to produce documents for multiple distribution channels simultaneously. There are some OSX workflows and bash scripts that will allow similar functionality on Mac and Linux, so I think this may be a good focus for beginning RPG publishers.
DeleteIn my case, I'll never target EPUB with my primary layout because I can't turn it into a print product without completely redoing the work. EPUB can work fine for strictly electronic products, but the big selling point of PDFs for me is that I can do layout only once.
ReplyDeleteWhat I'd argue -- will argue -- is that one layout for both etext and print is a bad path to take. What works in print often doesn't work on screen, unless your primary layout is aimed at etext, in which case you might as well do EPUB and convert to PDF.
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