Adapting Hesperian Books

We are working on creating adaptations of Hesperian Books. The work consists of:

1. Updating the InDesign documents:
   1. differentiate styles: The styles are needed to hint that text blocks are actually text insets, image labels, etc. Right now, just two or three are used for all text in the book.
   2. Adding textflow/reading order hints: The XHMTL export mechanism guesses the correct order most of the time, but it needs help here and there.
   3. Transforming layered images to something which exports better: A whole bunch of pictures in the books are actually a couple of images layered on top of each other in InDesign. The simples method is probably to turn them into illustrator images, and place those in the InDesign documents. The downside is that text will be rendered in the image. Better ideas welcome (css layers?).
2. Creating a common style sheet (CSS) for basic layout
3. Creating the per-chapter stylesheet with placement hints specific for elements in that chapter
4. Creating hyperlinks in the books for ease of use
5. Creating OnMouseOver glossary lookups
6. Find some color images to aid diagnosis: We are no longer constrained to the black and white line drawings.

Items 1, 2 and 3 are minimal requirements for a text readable in Browse.

4 and later nice to haves.