Writing an eText Book: progress update III

Well, I guess it is time for another update on the eText Book.

Things are still progressing well. The latest stats are:

Words: 24,000

Pages: 115

Graphics: 50

Questions: 90

I guess things have slowed down a bit in the last few weeks as in my last update I was at 17,400 words, around 70 questions and 30 images. There reason for the slowdown is I have been busy working on graphics and HTML widgets to include in the book. My guess, and this is a wild estimate, is I am about 50% of the way through. This means the final book should come in at around 48,000 words and 230 pages, and progress to date suggests I should finish the first draft by mid-May.

In the past few weeks I have run in to a number of problems with iBook Author.

The first one I encountered, and this took some time to track down and fix, was that certain graphics were appearing correctly in landscape mode, but when the iPad was rotated to portrait they were vanishing and not appearing in the lefthand margin with the other figures and tables. It turns out that you have to specify that an image is a 'figure' (as in Figure 1.3) and not just a 'page decoration' otherwise this will happen. I guess this makes sense as something you have added to a page to make it look 'pretty' may not be relevant to the text and therefore is not needed in portrait view.

I have also found that iBook Author doesn't handle widows and orphans very well (a widow is a paragraph-ending line that ends up at the start of a new page, and an orphan is a paragraph-start line that ends up at the bottom of a page). This is bit annoying as it means formatting has to be corrected 'by-hand' and this then has a 'knock-on' to the formatting in the other orientation of the book, that is, it looks good in landscape, but when rotated to portrait it doesn't look very good with large gaps appearing. The only solutions I have found to this problem is to pad out sections with extra words to force the widow on to the next page, or to give a section a good edit to pull the orphan back.

Also, there seems to be a size limit on the HTML widget size, something which I have not seen in the iBook Author instructions.

I came across the HTML widget size problem by accident when I discovered that one of the widgets I designed, and which was smaller than the maximum screen size of the iPad, would not work. After some fiddling around I discovered that the maximum size seems to be about 550 pixels square.

I also ran in to a slight problem using dropbox, but that was my own fault and was caused by having the same file open on two different computers at the same time (dropbox got confused synchronising the different sets of data and basically dropped one series of edits).

So, in summary, things are progressing well, but I am now worried whether or not the retina display on the new iPad will mean I will have to re-draw a number of figures with more dot per inch.

2 Comments

April 23, 2012 | 09:13 PM

Posted By: Nick Morris

Yes, the eBooks produced by iBook Author can be highly interactive, i.e. not just a pdf. You can include HTML widgets written in javascript (hence mini-programs and so highly interactive), and 3D images, as well as tests (mini-quizzes), and image galleries. It is also possible to add notes and generate flash-cards.

March 14, 2012 | 05:14 PM

Posted By: Khalil A. Cassimally

I don't think you've mentioned in the series but does iBook Author allow you to do more than a traditional ebook (a la pdf)? Can you make something interactive, etc... in the style of Scitable's Principles of Biology? This would be real cool.