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Epub Production/CSS/
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WordPress Security
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Font/Typography
Pimp My Type (aka Oliver Schöndorfer) has a good introduction to the font matrix pairing system. Here’s a One-Click Font Pairing Generator. Here’s a great YT discussion with Indra Kupferschmid (YT) about pairing fonts, 3 effective ways to pair fonts, and seeing/pairing typefaces. His Pimp My Type Newsletter is something I always read — especially his Font Friday reviews of various free fonts.
SuperHi YT channel has some good font vids. Getting started with variable fonts, adding web fonts with Google fonts,
Docbook XML/XSLT
Casual readers of this blog may not realize how deeply I have gotten into Docbook XML since 2010; Norman Walsh created Docbook to use for technical docs. Bob Stayton wrote these great Docbook XSLT stylesheets and user guide, and in the 2000s, another developer wrote a stylesheet outputting it to epub. Since 2010 I have learned everything about the Docbook XSLT stylesheets. The learning curve was pretty steep (and so was support for epub on the Kindle), but I figured everything out, and now it’s second nature for me. I have even used it to output static html websites (like this) which I think look first class.
At the same time, Docbook XSLT was based on XSLT 1.0, an out-of-date standard, and its rendering of HTML and CSS was archaic (even if the basic XML ontology was sound). The actual XSLT code was complicated and above my pay grade — although I was able to do several XSLT tweaks in my customization layer. People had talked about rewriting the XSL to bring it up to date, but it never actually happened. That wasn’t a real problem because the 1.0 stylesheets worked perfectly fine, and I already knew its idiosyncrasies. Another strange thing that happened is that the Docbook mailing list disappeared, and now nobody was really seeking help in a very public way.
Lo and behold, it now appears that Walsh has written the Docbook XSLT using XSLT 3.0, released it this year and seems to be updating it. It is called Docbook xslTNG , and I have been perusing the implementation instructions (quite complicated) and the enhanced functionality.
I think I’m going to play around with it. I use Oxygen XML editor to make content and handle the transforms (even though I don’t actually use Oxygen’s own transformations to do it). The hardest part appears to be setting up the toolchain (I have never heard of Maven, Gradle, Ant, etc and am barely fluent in github). The XSLT 3.0 syntax seems hard to figure out, but I can probably do it.
My main concern is epub output and making sure that I can re-create the XSLT customizations I did with the 1.0 XSLT in the 3.0 stylesheets. Recently I have gotten into using Docbook as a static site generator. I did it in my own funky (i.e., incompetent) way, and frankly some of the XHTML output no longer seems like proper code for mobile-friendly websites.
Strangely, even though I come from a technical writing background, I have not used Docbook very often for technical manuals or structured content. On the other hand, I have used the ARTICLE and BOOK docbook element to output all kinds of web content and sometimes content both for epubs and web content. Ironically, while busy rewriting/documenting my process and templates for XSLT 1.0 projects, I happened to stumble upon the new 3.0 stylesheets. Discovering this may be jump for joy (and sigh about the extra learning I’d need to do).
Again, there is something to be said for using the battle-tested old system (even if it’s more convoluted and requires more documentation on my part for my own projects). So I’m not totally onboard with switching to 3.0. On the other hand, I already know what Docbook is,what it can do and how a facelift could potentially make using it a lot easier than it used to be.
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