blog/data/2015-09-03-free-culture-cover.txt

   1 Title: Book cover for the Free Culture book finally done
   2 Tags: english, docbook, freeculture
   3 Date: 2015-09-03 21:00
   4
   5 <p>Creating a good looking book cover proved harder than I expected.
   6 I wanted to create a cover looking similar to the original cover of
   7 the
   8 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
   9 Culture</a> book we are translating to Norwegian, and I wanted it in
  10 vector format for high resolution printing.  But my inkscape knowledge
  11 were not nearly good enough to pull that off.
  12
  13 <p>But thanks to the great inkscape community, I was able to wrap up
  14 the cover yesterday evening.  I asked on the
  15 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23inkscape">#inkscape IRC channel</a>
  16 on Freenode for help and clues, and Marc Jeanmougin (Mc-) volunteered
  17 to try to recreate it based on the PDF of the cover from the HTML
  18 version.  Not only did he create a
  19 <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/copy1.svg ">SVG document with
  20 the original and his vector version side by side</a>, he even provided
  21 an <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/out-1.ogv">instruction
  22 video</a> explaining how he did it</a>.  But the instruction video is
  23 not easy to follow for an untrained inkscape user. The video is a
  24 recording on how he did it, and he is obviously very experienced as
  25 the menu selections are very quick and he mentioned on IRC that he did
  26 use some keyboard shortcuts that can't be seen on the video, but it
  27 give a good idea about the inkscape operations to use to create the
  28 stripes with the embossed copyright sign in the center.</p>
  29
  30 <p>I took his SVG file, copied the vector image and re-sized it to fit
  31 on the cover I was drawing.  I am happy with the end result, and the
  32 current english version look like this:</p>
  33
  34 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-03-free-culture-cover.png" width="70%" align="center"/>
  35
  36 <p>I am not quite sure about the text on the back, but guess it will
  37 do.  I picked three quotes from the official site for the book, and
  38 hope it will work to trigger the interest of potential readers.  The
  39 Norwegian cover will look the same, but with the texts and bar code
  40 replaced with the Norwegian version.</p>
  41
  42 <p>The book is very close to being ready for publication, and I expect
  43 to upload the final draft to Lulu in the next few days and order a
  44 final proof reading copy to verify that everything look like it should
  45 before allowing everyone to order their own copy of Free Culture, in
  46 English or Norwegian Bokmål.  I'm waiting to give the the productive
  47 proof readers a chance to complete their work.</p>