The Pandora Authors Guide

Written by: Julian I. Kamil

One of the goals of Pandora is to provide a tool that can be used to create highly usable and highly readable portable electronic contents. Although a great deal of usability and readability can be facilitated by the tool, they also depend greatly on the ability of book authors to create, structure, and present contents well.

Following are a few general guidelines that you should consider when writing a Pandora book, or when converting an existing book into Pandora format. Break these “rules” judiciously and when necessary, but make sure that you do so without compromising usability and readability of the book.

  Summary of Guidelines

1: Break up long contents into chapters and pages
2: Provide a custom table of contents
3: Use plain and numbered section headings effectively
4: Use markers, bullets, and textual styles effectively
5: Be consistent
6: Solicit readers feedback

And here are the detailed descriptions….

1: Break up long contents into chapters and pages

Unless you are presenting visual contents that naturally take up a lot of vertical space, it is a good idea to break textual contents up into smaller, more digestible and logically grouped contents.

Pandora provides the book chapter and page constructs to help authors structure book contents. When starting a new book, it is recommended to start by creating an outline of the chapters and pages that will make up the book.

2: Provide a custom table of contents

Although Pandora generates book and chapter table of contents automatically, you should add an introductory page to each chapter of the book, which are typically called “Introduction”. The autogenerated table of contents are meant to be a tool to help find all of the pages in a chapter and in a book, including orphan pages, and do not carry logical information about the contents of the book or the chapter. The introductory page is your tool to present the logical structure of the book or chapter to the readers.

It is also a good practice to provide navigational links that can directly take the readers to the introductory page either at the top of each page under the autogenerated trail path, or at the bottom, or both.

3: Use plain and numbered section headings effectively

Break up long pages into digestible sections with the appropriate headings. 3 to 5 paragraphs a section, and 3 to 5 sections a page are generally enough to make a sizeable page without going too much vertically.

Depending on the nature of the contents, sometimes you may want to number these section headings especially when they naturally represent some enumerables. Otherwise, do not number the sections, because the numbers would simply add clutters that gives the appearance of high complexity.

4: Use markers, bullets, and textual styles effectively

Within a section, sometimes it helps to mark enumerables to make them stand out by using the colored marker  , the plain bullet •, the inline heading title style, or the strong emphasis. However, avoid overusing any of these markers, because they could quickly turn into clutters that take away focus from the really important contents that you want to emphasize. They function as an attention getter, so make sure that you use them to enhance focus to a certain part of the page—and not to disperse attention.

5: Be consistent

Whether it is on the use of textual styles or the use language, always be consistent. When it makes sense, use nouns as book and chapter titles, and active commands for section headings.

Check the contents for spelling and grammatical errors, which are almost trivial to do in any text editors or word processors. Don’t let these silly mistakes take away from the professional look and feel of your book.

6: Solicit readers feedback

Encourage your readers to comment on the appearance, usability, and readability of your book, in addition to providing comments on the contents. Although individual responses could be very subjective and may not warrant any change in your book contents and presentation, in some cases you may find general patterns that could indicate a fundamental usability issue that should be corrected.

Future versions of Pandora will include an automated facility for collecting readers feedback on both the contents and presentation of the book. Until that feature is implemented, use email messaging as a way to collect readers feedback.

Do you have comments or suggestions about these guidelines? If so, please send an email with your constructive criticism to the author.