There was a great discussion in this Forum about my first effort to create a small book with Scribus here:
http://forums.scribus.net/index.php/topic,1494.0.html with a lot of really useful comments.
That book was in Dutch as its goal was to help Dutch people using the Xubuntu computer system for which little help is available in Dutch. It was meant to be read on screen, but a decent print was possible too. That book was very well received with far over 300 downloads within two months. It is a free download. I am now working on a second (Dutch) book for the MINT 17 XFCE computer system. The first step is to improve on that first book.
From the comments in that topic I created a new book. A sample only. To help understand the nature of this book I used English instead of Dutch and a lot of Lorem Ipsum. I am a Dutchman and it is quite hard to find wording to fit perfectly, so please be gentle on that. The books will all be in Dutch. The goal is to make this second book a lot better on layout and such with the help of this Forum.
My primary design goal is that these books are well readable on a computer or tablet screen with as a minimum screen size that of a 7" tablet. I followed all comments except some as I will explain below.
First of all I kept the three column basis layout. I want the pdf to open full screen and show the entire page. I thoroughly hate online publications based on a portrait layout, where I need to scroll up and down all the time to read an article. Nice for a publication to be printed, but my books are not likely to be printed by anyone.
So I kept the three column page set-up, but I changed the font size down to 10 pt. Now reading a 7" tablet is rather hard, but on bigger computer screens it should be just fine and the text in these three columns is less broken up. I want to care for readers with reading problems to some extent and on limited hardware and feel not to happy about the smaller font myself really. But then they can use the zoom function of course.
Regarding the screen-shots I have put in a lot of effort to get sharp, crisp screen-shots. They are a lot better than in quite some commercial publications, but they still are problematic and need a lot of attention. In this sample I have put in some screen-shots taken from the first book, just to be able to show the layout of images and captions.The quality is not that great, but that I know and will address later in the production process.
Here is the link to the sample / version 2:
http://bit.ly/10Y7XKyLooking forward to any comments!
regards,
Just Vecht