Paged Design

Customisable themes for book design with CSS

Are you creating books with HTML and CSS? Stylesheets for books can be long and complicated to write. Our themes give you a head start: pick a theme, add it to your project, and customise it.

Note that paged.js and this project are in development, so expect bugs, workarounds, and exciting possibilities, and contribute if you can.

Themes

• Beatrix

  

  Named for Ms Potter, a classic children's book theme for simple stories. Goes well with Alice in Wonderland.

  Download

• Density

  

  A space-age look for big books. Goes well with The Future of Ideas, by Lawrence Lessig.

  Download

• Plastered

  

  A wild and wonky look for grabbing attention. Goes well with Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow.

  Download

• Template

  

  A plain template with very few opinions, and the starting place for creating brand new themes. Goes well with our typography samples.

  Download

These are just a small start. If you're interested in more themes, tell us so that we know it's worth investing time in more theme development.

Sample content

This demo site includes four pieces of sample content for seeing themes at work:

• A book of sample features common to most books
• Alice in Wonderland
• The first chapter of Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow
• The first chapter of The Future of Ideas, by Lawrence Lessig.

For each one, use the theme-selector dropdown to see the browser lay out the book before your eyes. (Only Chrome can get this right currently.)

How to use a theme

Setting up

1. You'll need to have NodeJS installed on your computer. Our themes are written in Sass, and you'll use Node to build that into your finished CSS.
2. Download a theme package and unzip it.
3. Place the unzipped theme folder in your project. We're assuming that your project is contained in a single folder (like a Git repo), in which you can add your theme folder.
4. In the head of your HTML (the content of your book), link to the compiled CSS file in your new theme folder. The path will depend on your folder structure, for example ../css/beatrix/themes/beatrix/main.css:
   

   <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../css/beatrix/themes/beatrix/main.css">

5. In the head of your HTML, link to the paged.js script, which will lay out your pages in Chrome. For instance, if you want to always link to the latest official version:

   <script src="https://unpkg.com/pagedjs/dist/paged.polyfill.js"></script>

6. Serve your HTML. For example, if you're using Node and have http-server installed, you can run npm run http-server -p 4000 in your project root folder, and visit your site at http://localhost:4000.

Now that you're up and running, you can customise your theme.

Customising a theme

Once you're set up:

1. Install dependencies. To do this, from the command line, in the unzipped theme folder (alongside package.json), enter:

   npm install

   which will install a modules to node_modules that we need in that folder.

2. Start our Node script to watch for changes to your styles. To do this, in the same folder, at the command line, enter:

   npm buildcss

   Node Sass will now be watching for changes to your styles. Every time you change a file in your theme's Sass files, your compiled CSS will automatically update and you only need to refresh your browser to see your new styles. You may need to hard refresh (Ctrl+F5 or Cmd+R).

3. Set your selectors for book features in /themes/YOURTHEME/_selectors.scss (where YOURTHEME is the name of the theme you’ve downloaded).
4. Set any new values for design variables in /themes/YOURTHEME/_variables.scss. See the _defaults for the variables you can set.
5. Add your own Sass/CSS styles to /themes/YOURTHEME/_styles.scss.

There are some technical docs on GitHub.

About

This project is maintained by Electric Book Works, and made possible by funding and encouragement from Adam Hyde, the Paged Media initiative, and the Shuttleworth Foundation.

You can get the code and contribute on GitHub.