Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Laying Out a Print Book with CSS

iangmcdowell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 121 posts

Re: Laying Out a Print Book with CSS

#21

Post by bryanrasmussen »

TylerE wrote: post #10
noufalibrahim wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I was going to echo this sentiment but it looks like you pre emptively followed me. The article has the air of a hack done just for the fun of it because the author can. This was popular once upon a time but these days, it's mostly stuff written to promote certain things or as marketing copy.

This is marketing, don’t kid yourself.

yeah, it seems a bit weird to be marketing your techno thriller book with a post about css. I mean I guess there is some overlap between the two subjects, as there is likely be overlap between anything in a world with complicated people.

Re: Laying Out a Print Book with CSS

#22

Post by TylerE »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #21
TylerE wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is marketing, don’t kid yourself.

yeah, it seems a bit weird to be marketing your techno thriller book with a post about css. I mean I guess there is some overlap between the two subjects, as there is likely be overlap between anything in a world with complicated people.

It. Is. Marketing. The very first sentence is just a link to Amazon to buy the thing.

Re: Laying Out a Print Book with CSS

#23

Post by rhn_mk1 »

DeinFreund wrote: post #19

This article completely misses the point. Proper typesetting is about achieving a consistent appearance starting from ligatures and kerning, then word spacing and hyphenation, up to entire paragraphs and pages. Each character has to be typeset considering what character came before, how many words are in the same line and other lines in the same paragraph. The choice of font is also questionable, but not the main iss…

I think the article stated the point clearly: the author wanted to hold some paper carrying the HTML contents. From what I can see, they hit the point completely.

Perfect is the enemy of the good, they say.

Re: Laying Out a Print Book with CSS

#25

Post by benoliver999 »

colonwqbang wrote: post #20
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #16

Why not Scribus? It's FOSS, mature, and actively used for book layouts by others. It comes up in searches for "free InDesign alternative" and "foss book layout" (it's mentioned in every search result that I viewed [not many]). I mean, perhaps it didn't fit the story that showed the blog post to be used to trail the book, but I'd have thought it would be mentioned.

Do you have experience with it yourself? I haven't tried it for several years, but it was not at all usable last time I did. For a project like this, I think it's a good choice to go with something more declarative over a WYSIWYG tool. Latex would have been a very good choice, but only if you already happen to know it or have an interest in learning.

I use it for graphics heavy stuff like product packaging, instruction manuals etc.

For a book I'd just throw it in latex for sure.

Re: Laying Out a Print Book with CSS

#26

Post by Semaphor »

ognarb wrote: post #24

For those interested in this topic, you might want to checked paged.js https://pagedjs.org/documentation/ It's an polyfil for the unimplemented CSS paged specification, which is exactly that is needed for laying out pages. https://www.w3.org/TR/css-page-3/

And print-css.rocks [0] for a comparison of tools, with support matrices, and tutorials. We use Weasyprint [1] to create PDF ebooks with HTML and CSS.

[0]: https://www.print-css.rocks/

[1]: https://doc.courtbouillon.org/weasyprint/stable/

Re: Laying Out a Print Book with CSS

#27

Post by Moru »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #16

Why not Scribus? It's FOSS, mature, and actively used for book layouts by others. It comes up in searches for "free InDesign alternative" and "foss book layout" (it's mentioned in every search result that I viewed [not many]). I mean, perhaps it didn't fit the story that showed the blog post to be used to trail the book, but I'd have thought it would be mentioned.

He also states the Hammer and Nail situation. If your only tool is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail. I get the impression he wanted to use something he knew instead of spending time learning something new.

Re: Laying Out a Print Book with CSS

#29

Post by somat »

blue1 wrote: post #17

One serious problem is that CSS do not support CMYK colors.

Might be a joke, humor can be difficult to convey in forum post form, And I am that stereotypical sort who often does not get humor. But I will bite.

It is a printed book... there is no color in the process.

Re: Laying Out a Print Book with CSS

#30

Post by rob74 »

True story: I once had to update an OpenOffice document containing mostly photos and insert newer photos. How hard can it be? Finally, I got so frustrated with OpenOffice constantly breaking the layout and simply refusing to fit the images I wanted to fit on a page on a page (needless to say that they did fit on a page in the old version of the document) that I gave up, built an HTML page with the images and printed it to PDF. Done!
Post reply on HN