(no subject)

[elainegrey]

I have been devoured by my curiosity of how to describe the growth pattern of borage: current resources all describe it as cymose, but when i observe mine, it seems to be the opposite: racemose.

I have also been playing with Apple's iBook Author application and have a chapter in a minibook completed, illustrating my confusion.

All is fair, because i have devoured a number of borage blossoms.

Between rest and research, i think i am relaxing.

If you have an iPad and i can demonstrate that i can distribute an iBook without publishing it to the iBook iStore, would you like to read my iBook?

Comments

[sonia]

Sure, I'm interested in reading your iBook. Are you looking for feedback?

[elainegrey]

Thanks! No ETA yet.

Christine will proofread; the feedback i'd be curious about is the sensory and emotional experience. The colors, the font, etc: do they combine to in a pleasant way? Because right now i'm thinking "fussy" and "cluttered", but i've spent two days staring at it.

[sonia]

Happy to provide opinions on how those come across to me when you're ready. I did a lot of reading and fiddling before I chose fonts for my book.

Beware of ligatures, though. I actually need to go back and futz with my epub book because I used Garamond and it's using ligatures even though I explicitly told it not to. Which are missing on most people's machines, so all the fi's and ff's etc. are missing. :-P I'm thinking of just making the darn thing Times New Roman or whatever the default is and giving up on having precisely the look I wanted.

If you already have a solution for that, please do tell!

[elainegrey]

And the font i chose was, drum roll, Garamond.

It's so much more aesthetically pleasing than Times!

It looks like the iBook format (only for iCrap, by the way, different than ePub) embeds the font file. I'm using iBooks for the interactivity -- it's a halfway (quarter-way?) point to the iPad app. The longer term plan calls for branching out to the different available platforms, particularly when the writing is a focus.

I suppose i could translate this into an ePub application and see how it goes. The photo "widgets" in the IBook format wouldn't be in place, but i wonder if the widgets are actually more cluttery than delightful.