Colophon

Colophon

Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects.

The animals on the cover of XSLT Cookbook, Second Edition are red mullet fish. These colorful striped fish are native to warm European seas. They are bottom dwellers that feed on small invertebrates such as crustaceans, worms, and mollusks, along with the occasional small fish. Red mullet are also called goatfish, as they have two flexible whisker-like appendages that hang from their chins. These organs, called barbels, are covered with taste buds to help red mullet locate their food and dig into ocean sand. The fish usually weigh one-half to two pounds and can grow as long as two feet, but most are much smaller. They have a deeply forked tail fin, two dorsal fins, and corresponding pectoral and anal fins. Red mullet are indeed pink to bright red in color, with three or four yellow stripes running lengthwise along their sides. Considerable changes in color occur depending on the time of day, stress factors, and age.

Seafood chefs have always prized the red mullet for its firm, lean flesh, subtle flavor, and intense color. The fish is found on menus throughout Europe, but is rarely available in the United States. Red mullet is sometimes called the woodcock of the sea because, like the woodcock, it can be eaten with its innards intact. There are around 40 known subspecies, but 2 types are most popular for food: Mullus surmuletus is commonly found in the Atlantic around the south coast of Britain, and Mullus barbatus is a more delicate Mediterranean variety. The latter was a favorite of the ancient Romans, who proudly displayed live red mullet on the dinner table immediately before handing them over to the cook. Stock was kept in large lagoons, and zealous gourmands paid fabulous prices for any specimen above average size.

Adam Witwer was the production editor for XSLT Cookbook , Second Edition. Lydia Onofrei and Colleen Gorman provided quality control. Octal Publishing, Inc. provided production services and wrote the index.

Ellie Volckhausen designed the cover of this book, based on a series design by Edie Freedman. The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. Karen Montgomery produced the cover layout with Adobe InDesign CS using Adobe's ITC Garamond font.

David Futato designed the interior layout. This book was converted by Keith Fahlgren to FrameMaker 5.5.6 with a format conversion tool created by Erik Ray, Jason McIntosh, Neil Walls, and Mike Sierra that uses Perl and XML technologies. The text font is Linotype Birka; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont's TheSans Mono Condensed. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano, Jessamyn Read, and Lesley Borash using Macromedia FreeHand MX and Adobe Photoshop CS. The tip and warning icons were drawn by Christopher Bing. This colophon was written by Philip Dangler.

The online edition of this book was created by the Digital Books production group (John Chodacki, Ken Douglass, and Ellie Cutler) using a set of Frame-to-XML conversion and cleanup tools written and maintained by Erik Ray, Benn Salter, John Chodacki, Ellie Cutler, and Jeff Liggett.