Creating a faithful online reproduction of a book considered one of the most beautiful and unusual publications ever published is a daunting task. Byrne’s Euclid is my tribute to Oliver Byrne’s most celebrated publication from 1847 that illustrated the geometric principles established in Euclid’s original Elements from 300 BC.
In 1847, Irish mathematics professor Oliver Byrne worked closely with publisher William Pickering in London to publish his unique edition titled The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid in which colored Diagrams and Symbols are Used Instead of Letters for the Greater Ease of Learners—or more simply, Byrne’s Euclid. Byrne’s edition was one of the first multicolor printed books and is known for its unique take on Euclid’s original work using colorful illustrations rather than letters when referring to diagrams. The precise use of colors and diagrams meant that the book was very challenging and expensive to reproduce. Little is known about why Byrne only designed 6 of the 13 books but it was could have been due to time and cost involved…I knew of other projects like TeX’, 2019”>Sergey Slyusarev’s ConTeXt rendition and Kronecker Wallis’ modern redesign but I hadn’t seen anyone reproduce the 1847 edition online in its entirety and with a design true to the original. This was my goal and I knew it was going to be a fun challenge.
[Detailed discussion of how to use Adobe Illustrator to redraw the modernist art-like primary color diagrams from Byrne in scalable vector graphics (SVG) for use in interactive HTML pages, creation of a custom dropcaps/initials font to replicate Byrne, his (questionable) efforts to use the ‘long s’ for greater authenticity, rendering the math using MathJax, and creating posters demonstrating all diagrams from the project for offline viewing.]