Paged Media

… and then came CSS3 and the possibility of telling stories using different forms of letters.

31 October - 2 November, San Francisco
An Event Apart - three days of design, code and content includes three events of special interest to Paged Media followers:

Yet despite the overwhelming flow of information on the Web, there is still something about a book that holds a special weight and importance. I don’t think this is just nostalgia, either.

The visual impact of text — whether it is carved in stone, printed on paper, displayed on screen, or comprises an ebook - can be influenced by a number of factors. Color is one of those. Sometimes, those colors are made from light, sometimes, from the craftsmanship of a painter.

Once upon a time, there was a letter at the start of the first paragraph of a text. It was bigger than the other letters, and, sometimes, it had different colors from the black of the text. It could even hide some symbol or some illustrations and was a way to introduce the reader to the text that followed. At that time, books were hidden in the darkest rooms of religious places or castles, and the only light available to help readers when the sun was down was a candle and its dancing flame.

I can’t remember when Adam Hyde first suggested to me that CSS regions might be a viable way to produce PDFs for scholarly communications but it seemed like a good idea at that time and, I think, it still does. CaSSius is my implementation of that idea.

To back up a bit, at the moment in scholarly communications, the production stage usually involves creating a PDF and XML copy in tandem, perhaps using a tool like eXtyles and a process involving Adobe InDesign.

Books are sacred. Think of how we react to book burnings. Think how hard it is to throw a book away. We build temples for them - there’s a library in almost every town. Many of us have more books in our houses than any other object, besides Lego. They might be the most spectacularly successful technology of all time.

A book’s contents might be great art. The book itself might be great art, too. A book may take years or decades to create—perhaps the work of dozens or hundreds of people beyond the author. It can be a monument you can hold in your hand.