Keith Fahlgren's dashboard

Hi Viren,

Viren wrote:
> So, its an important aspect of your books. In my sincere opinion, could you
> guys just change the fonts if its not that big of a deal?

(reiterating what Tim wrote)
At this point, it's not the lack of a single font that bothers us, it's the lack of a whole class of (important) fonts. We certainly would use any monospace (fixed-width) font, but the Kindle doesn't provide a single one. We're currently evaluating other options to see if a different approach to code fonts and whitespace makes more sense.

> The books will not meet the practical purpose if code is unreadable.

We hope to counter some of this anxiety by making PDF versions (with good typography) available alongside any ebooks. That way, when the reader is in doubt about the meaning of a particular section they'll have another, more legible, version available.

@rodbegbie: One of the remaining problems preventing a full adoption of the Kindle from technical publishers like O'Reilly is the lack of any fixed-width ("monospace", Courier) font on the Kindle. We've figured out ways around most of the other constraints, but we're reluctant to sell our content without the ability to present programming code properly (no carriage returns, spacing, vertical alignment).

Hi,

> What authoring tools would you recommend for content published both
> on-line and on paper?

Without hesitation, an XML format will provide you with the best chances for re-use. That said, adopting XML workflows can be tricky and choosing the right standard (like DocBook) is important to get right & dependent on what sort of stuff you're writing.

For a more specific answer to your question, our others write DocBook in vim, emacs, oXygen, and XMLMind's XML Editor, among other pieces of software.

> I read that O'Reilly use XML, and know you have used docbook in the past.

We do indeed use DocBook inside O'Reilly as the canonical storage format for the majority of our titles. DocBook provides a rich set of semantic markup that maps well to O'Reilly's content (perhaps because we helped start the discussion that eventually led to the DocBook standard many years ago). Over the last few years, we've started pushing DocBook more heavily as an authoring and manuscript format because, like you, we've become more interested in multi-format publishing.

DocBook is very good in this regard expressly because of its rich semantics: in the XML world, it's typically easy to go to a simpler format, so the DocBook-XSL projects already have tried-and-true output into PDF (via XSL-FO), HTML Help, (X)HTML, and others. I've recently contributed another output format, the IDPF's .epub standard, which took only a couple of months on the side to get implemented.

All that said, the big downside with DocBook is the complexity of the standard (hundreds of tags) and the complexity of the toolchains (for HTML, PDF, etc). I'd suggest skimming the definitive DocBook-XSL reference, DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide (http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/in...) to see if you're interested in both the rewards and the drawbacks. If you'd like to chat with others, the http://docbook.org page has instructions for joining the docbook and docbook-apps mailing list, both of which are very helpful to newcomers. Finally, if you're not in a rush, keep an eye on the work being done by the OASIS DocBook SubCommittee for Publishers, which is working on a smaller version of DocBook for non-technical folks (I'm a member of that).

For more context on choosing an XML workflow, check out:
* http://toc.oreilly.com (the place for publishers trying to innovate)
* http://xml.com/ (All things XML, search for 'publishing')
* http://www.thecontentwrangler.com/art...

> Is this a good route to go down?

Yep, but it takes a lot of work to get setup.

Please get support for Minefield.app ASAP. I'd imagine it's just a name-recognition issue, so it should be an easy fix (and I want my URL-recognition back in RescueTime!). Your current audience is mainly alpha-geeks right now, so I'd bet there are a lot running one of the FF3 nightlies.

Hi,

There's a new edition in the works, just as you'd hope. It should come out next year.

Regards,
Keith