I will give a talk , The Art of the Book, at the San Angelo Writers Club on Tuesday, May 9 at 7:00 pm. I will discuss book interior design for beginners. The meeting will be at First Place, 14 East Harris Avenue, San Angelo, across from the First Baptist Church.
I teach General Chemistry with a flipped classroom. In class, the students work in groups to complete worksheets that cover the ideas of the day. I am making these worksheets available free to teaching professionals.
The Flipped General Chemistry page contains a description of how I flip the classroom. There you can download examples of my assignment sheets, worksheets, and worksheet keys. There is a link to Worksheets page (password required), which is also accessible from the main menu. The Worksheets page currently contains 40 worksheets for General Chemistry I. Each download is a .zip file that unzips to PDF files of the worksheets, editable copies, folders of graphics files, and snapshots of the online homework assignments (SmartWork). As the Fall semester winds down, I will start posting edited and corrected worksheets for General Chemistry II. I will send you the password to the worksheets page if you email me at JohnOsterhout<at>JohnOsterhout<dot>com or look me up at Angelo State University, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and email me there. Please send me a link to your professional website.
Just Lorem Ipsum is a demonstration book for self-publishing with open-source software. It is one hundred pages of lorem ipsum, basically ten chapters of faux Latin filler text. To produce the book I used Scribus, an open source desktop publishing program with a little help from the GIMP and Inkscape. The book contains an appendix that describes its production, including details of making the cover and setting up Scribus for the book interior. Although there is little to read in Just Lorem Ipsum it will be available in mid-December, 2016, as a paperback on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Ingram. If you want a hard copy for some reason, by all means buy one. I promise to spend the proceeds on good beer. If you can’t be bothered to spring for the $14.99, just download the cover and interior files in this post. The blurbs are worth reading…
The cover for Just Lorem Ipsum, my Linux demonstration book, is finished. I used the free and open-source program Scribus to prepare the PDF. Read all about it!
What do you do for young writers? Give them a copy of The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, of course! This quote, one of my favorites from Dorothy Parker, gives a little more advice…
Here is the first draft of the cover of my open-source demonstration book, Just Lorem Ipsum. The book has been the subject of previous posts (Just Lorem Ipsum and Just Lorem Ipsum – Scribus Template). The cover was produced using open-source software, specifically the raster graphics program, the GIMP, and the vector graphics program Inkscape. In this post I discuss how the cover was produced and provide the source files to get you started.
I am preparing Just Lorem Ipsum as a demonstration of the use of open-source software for book production. The interior of the book was produced with Scribus using free fonts. The text of the book is largely Lorem Ipsum placeholder text. Lorem Ipsum is fractured Latin, derived from a passage in “De finibus bonorum et malorum” by Cicero dating from the 1st century BC. The interior of the book is done except for the final corrections. You can download the complete book as a .PDF (see below).
Self-publishing authors can save a lot of up-front investment by taking a do-it-yourself approach to book publication. Free and open-source programs such as LibreOffice (office suite) and Scribus (desktop publishing) can be a big help. I have developed some book templates for both LibreOffice and Scribus to help would-be publishers get started with free software. In this post, I introduce a romance-novel template for Scribus. This template gives similar results to the LibreOffice template from my previous post. Like the LibreOffice template, the Scribus template uses the Honey Script font by Dieter Steffmann to give the book a breezy look that is compatible with romance or fantasy novels. The template file uses free fonts and comes with specifications and instructions. The package is free.
I present my latest LibreOffice template: Romance! This template uses the Honey Script font by Dieter Steffmann to give the book a breezy look that is compatible with romance or romantic fantasy novels. The template file uses free fonts and comes with specifications and instructions. The package is free.
My new book, “Just Lorem Ipsum” is a demonstration of the use of open-source software for book production. The idea is to use open source software, free fonts and self-produced graphics for the book. Since this is an exercise, I am going to use Lorem Ipsum placeholder text. Lorem Ipsum is fractured Latin, derived from a passage in “De finibus bonorum et malorum” by Cicero dating from the 1st century BC. I envision a slim volume of about one hundred pages. What could I call it but “Just Lorem Ipsum”? I chose a 8×5.25″ trim size for the book. This gives me an opportunity to provide a Scribus template in this new size. (Updated on 6/20/16.)