Hi, guys.

I am reading RwandAir’s inflight mag for this March-May edition, and it is very beautiful. I am wondering how far anyone has ever pushed Prince in the realm of magazine design. I have never done it, and Prince is all the “publishing” I know. I wonder if whatever designer tools they use can be matched by Prince.

This magazine is so beautiful, I cannot even imagine what combination of CSS would give me such design. I can’t, for example, stretch an image reliably across two pages, such that one half covers the @page:left and the other half covers the @page:right. There is text on the page, as well, such that the stretched image is either z-index’ed or it is a background of @page. This probably belongs in “How Do I …?”

Just tell me: what is the most-complex, most-beautiful Prince design? Links?

Edited 28 May 2014 by revence27

Prince is not focused on magazine-style layout at the moment, although we hope to reach that level one day. For the page background example, currently you would need to chop the image in half and place each half as a background on the @page.

I'm afraid @mikeday has underestimated the power of his creation! There has been an explosion of amazing CSS work in the last few years, and Prince is a very good rendering engine, and getting better with every release. I can think of only a few useful things I could do in InDesign that I couldn't in CSS.

*Managing* the code for a publication with magazine-level complexity and variety could be challenging, depending on the tools at hand – but that's not Prince's fault!

I've spent the last couple years making some high-quality publications (focusing on Annual Reports) and the tools to produce them. Here are a couple of links, I'll post back here with some more when I get permission from clients.

ES Bankers Dubai 2012 Annual Report – http://www.esbd.com/ESBD-AnnualReport-2012.pdf

Realstone RDF Annual Report 2013 – http://www.realstone.ch/sites/default/files/factsheet/Realstone_RDF_AnnualReport_2013_fr_2014-04-17b.pdf


As for the double-page image spread question – the Dubai report above does this, and it's even 'easier' than mikeday suggests (no need to butcher the image file, just use some CSS magic):

I put the same image in a 'frame' div on each page; and on the right-hand page, I move the image in the frame one page-width to the left.

(similar to the image-box-in-a-frame approach GUI page layout software uses.)

Essentially, there are two views of the image, one for each page, and one of them is moved around to line up with the other.

Image frames have an absolute position and a negative Z value, so they just sit there under the page content.

I use backgrounds (so I can switch between screen and print resolution photographs using only CSS), but the same technique works with IMG tags as well.

With proper markup and some smart CSS code, the image could be repositioned in the two pages simultaneously by changing only one value, which would take some complexity out of the fussing-and-fiddling stage of production.

Nice work. I will not pause until I can out-design you. —But what a challenge. Nice work, man.

Mike Day has done such sweet work, I hope he one day (or already) wakes up very rich and satisfied for it.

Myself, this is what I am currently engaged in with Prince, in the real of “beautiful”.
My mother gave her farm a horrible name, but I tried to brighten it up a bit when I designed her marketing material: http://localhost.ug/Nutri•Best.pdf
I run a hosting service, http://localhost.ug/ and now one core service I am hoping to test out in the market is websites that turn into posters. The site itself has one: http://localhost.ug/localhost.ug.pdf That kind of thing.

The rest of my work is in rather staid things like Bibles and hymnals and things, which, even then, I try to spice up with Prince’s awesome capabilities. http://tertius.1st.ug/

@adriencater, I am going to study your work very closely. Tell me, which paper size is this you are working with in the two links?

@revence27

Working with DIN A4 paper, standard in Europe and most other countries – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_216.