Thursday, April 4, 2013

Spanner R4 Update: A Short Break to Catch My Breath (and Upgrade my CSS Hacking Skills)

NaNoEdMo is over, and with it the most intense editing experience of my life. I had my celebration; now I deserve a few days' break. And so I'm posting Interlude 13 tomorrow and starting Chapter 22 on Monday.

Meanwhile, I checked out a couple library books on Cascading Style Sheets, one on CSS3, thinking I could learn a few things that might be relevant to the HTML5-based EPUB3 ebook format while I was waiting for my brother to drop off a new bookcase. The Spanner book 1 ebook is in the trusty old standard EPUB 2 based on XHTML, but I'm doing book 2 in EPUB3. I also had in mind some serious CSS hacks for Chapters 22 and 23, especially when the superheroes start mind-bombing the rebellious civilians, Echelon gets its first speaking lines, and the Rockers bring out the sound cannons. I found myself neglecting Interlude 13 for a day while I worked out, by trial and error, a series of new CSS hacks for the ebook version of Chapters 1, 20, and 21. I made several changes to the ebook stylesheet, threw out the styles that didn't work, and kept the ones that did. Mostly this had to do with styling sections set off by the <div> tag and the <p> and <span> tags within <div>s. I haven't yet experimented with the font and text-box properties I'll be playing around with in Chapters 22 and 23.

So I'm slowing down the schedule again so I can take more time to work with styles in those final two style-heavy chapters. Back to the three-a-week schedule. Interlude 13 posts tomorrow; Chapter 22 begins on Monday.

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