Legible Typography

This repo is a Jekyll adaptation of Mary C. Dyson's book ‘Legibility: how and why typography affects ease of reading’.

The repository also includes a auto-generated PDF version of this site.

Publishing updates

The site https://legible-typography.com/ is run as a Github pages Jekyll website. Pushing to the main branch of the repo will automatically update the website.

Updating the PDF

To re-generate the PDF requires manually running a local preview version of the Jekyll site and running bash script that uses wkhtmltopdf. The output generates a timestamped PDF, so the link to download the PDF needs to be updated!

Running the site locally

1. Clone the repo
2. Install Jekyll (requires Ruby): gem install
3. Run the site locally with: bundle exec jekyll serve --trace
4. The site should be accessible locally at http://127.0.0.1:4000/

Generating the PDF

1. Make sure the ghostscript binary gs is installed, otherwise install it
2. Install wkhtmltopdf 0.12.6 (with patched qt) e.g. with: brew install wkhtmlpdf
3. Run the site locally as described above - a print CSS version of THE LOCAL SITE is what get written to the PDF!
4. (Make sure the script is executable with chmod +x make-pdf.sh)
5. Generate a new PDF with ./make-pdf.sh
6. Make sure to git add the new PDFs; the links to the files should automatically get updated

The generation will take a couple of minutes. Each chapter and section of the book is output as separate PDF, then combined into one PDF file at the end and saved as assets/downloads/... .pdf

The PDF should at the very least be re-generated whenever content changes have been made to the texts or illustrations.

The assets/css/print.scss is used by wkhtmltopdf and alters the styling of the Jekyll site into a more PDF suitable reading experience.

Update the links (PDF timestamps!) in footer.html.

Translations

Currently the site is available in English and Spanish. The page contents are suffixed accordingly and both run from this same Jekyll installation.