Courses/Hybrid publishing

Professional development workshop on Hybrid Publishing

practicals

• feedback on workshop: Courses/Hybrid_publishing/feedback
• room: BL.00.10a
• duration: 3 hours
• date: March 8 afternoon (1.30-16.30+ drinks until 5).
• software used:
  • Calibre,
  • Pandoc,
  • plain-text editors ( Sublime Text, Gedit )
  • Base64 encoder: ( Online encoder, Convert64 (Mac OS X, commercial)

Plan

• Hybrid publishing.
• Motivations, concepts, tools, strategies, formats that have been present in hybrid publishing efforts of WdKA. 
• Role and possibilities for publishing in an art school. 
• Presentation of developed and in-progress publications . 
• Inauguration the Device Lab.

Why publishing?

• hybrid publishing as an extension of efforts from Publication station - establishing dialog between analog & digital 
• continuation of Alessandro Ludovico's research on Post-Digital Print at WdKA
• continuation of Digital Publishing Toolkit project & From Print to Ebooks – a Hybrid Publishing Toolkit for the Arts
• publishing as a way to expose the research undertaken within WdKA
• publishing as a learning tool

Possibilities and constraints

Plain text + poor visuals vs. rich visuals + interactivity

How hybrid?

"a single 'entity' that would extensively implement both worlds (analogue and digital), we might call this entity a 'hybrid' – a publication which would 'perform the networks' in depth"
Ludovico, Alessandro. “Networks as Agents in the Clash Between Personal and Industrial Post-Digital Print.” Progetto Grafico, August 2015.

Video from Ludovico's presentation of “Networks as Agents in the Clash Between Personal and Industrial Post-Digital Print.”

hybrid publishing works

Traumawien [1] [2] http://rlv.zcache.com/traumawien_button-rb0a7981400224870838ec6aaa582161c_x7j3i_8byvr_512.jpg

Badlands Unlimited http://badlandsunlimited.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/book_small.gif http://badlandsunlimited.com/books/phaedrus-pron/

Books Scapes, Julien Levesque, 2012

http://p-dpa.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2014-02-15-at-17.17.18-600x150.png

E-Book Backup, Jesse England, 2012

http://p-dpa.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/9_ebookbackup4-300x225.jpg

More hybrid publishing works in Post-Digital Publishing Archive

Multichannel publishing workflows

• ePub
• PDF
• self-contained single-file HTML e-books
• Comic book Archive
• ebook trailer

Ebook trailer for From Print to Ebooks

Ebook trailer for From Print to Ebooks

Tools for hybrid publishing

open source, simple tools that work in combination, forming publishing pipelines

• Wikis aka Quick
• Calibre
• Pandoc
• [3]

plain text files

Are only constituted by text. No images, no visual markings.

Are edited using plain text editors and NOT word processors.

Can be displayed using the terminal cat myfile.txt will print the content of myfile.txt

Markings are done using special (meta)characters

Historical examples of plain text file undeground publishing

Markups

"In electronic processing of texts, this hierarchical ordering [...] as well as additional reading aids such bold or italic text, is made possible by using specific formatting codes. This process is called markup and the codes are called markup element"From Print to Ebooks: a Hybrid Publishing Toolkit for the Arts

Different Markup languages

Each markup uses a different marking syntax

HTML:

<h1>Revenge of the Text</h1>
 <p>There is a room in the <strong>Musée d’Orsay</strong> that I call the <em>room of possibilities</em>.</p>
 <p>That room contains:</p>
 <ul>
  <li>a snow flake</li>
  <li>the end of a cloud</li>
  <li>a bit of nothing</li>
 </ul>

Wiki markup:

= Revenge of the Text =
There is a room in the '''Musée d’Orsay''' that I call the ''room of possibilities''.

That room contains:
* a snow flake
* the end of a cloud
* a bit of nothing

Markdown:

# Revenge of the Text
There is a room in the **Musée d’Orsay** that I call the *room of possibilities*.

That room contains:
* a snow flake
* the end of a cloud
* a bit of nothing

TEI XML:

p> <hi>A New yeares guift for shrews</hi> is a diminutive sheet engraved c.1630 and signed by the relatively unknown Thomas Cecill, who seems to have been active between 1625 and 1640. It bears the imprint of the even less known Edward Lee, whose only other issue is a large equestrian portrait of Charles I. </p>
<p>In a series of unified scenes, it depicts the traditional nagging wife eventually beaten by her husband, and ultimately chased off by the devil. It is accompanied by the following rhyme of a traditional type, reminiscent of the ditty about <hi>Solomon Grundy</hi>, who was <hi>Born on Monday</hi>, and then on successive days christened, married, taken fatally ill and <hi>Buried on Sunday</hi>: </p>
<q>
<lg rend="italics">
<l>Who marieth a wife uppon a Moneday,</l>
<l>If she will not be good uppon a Tewesday, </l>
<l>Lett him go to the wood uppon a Wensday, </l>
<l>And cutt him a cudgell uppon the Thursday, </l>
<l>And pay her soundly uppon a Fryday; </l>
<l>And<note><hi>And</hi>: if</note> she mend not, the Divil take her a Saterday </l>
<l>Then may he eate his meate in peace on the Sonday.</l>
</lg>
</q>

Docbook XML

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <book xml:id="simple_book" xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook" version="5.0">
   <title>Very simple book</title>
   <chapter xml:id="chapter_1">
     <title>Chapter 1</title>
     <para>Hello world!</para>
     <para>I hope that your day is proceeding <emphasis>splendidly</emphasis>!</para>
   </chapter>
   <chapter xml:id="chapter_2">
     <title>Chapter 2</title>
     <para>Hello again, world!</para>
   </chapter>
 </book>

Reference: Petr van Blokland, Het boek als object, Items, 2004 (!)

Create one plain-text file

Using either in HTML or Wiki syntax:

• write it from scratch
• copy HTML content from any website with "View Source"
• copy Wiki content from any wiki: Publication Station, Beyond Social, Wikipedia, etc
• edit its content

Save it dedicated folder.

turn this file into into other formats

...with Pandoc

Pandoc - a markup converter 

If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife

Pandoc - Convert from Wiki to HTML

pandoc --from mediawiki --to html5 --standalone input.mw -o output.html

• --from - option standing for “from”, is followed by the input format;
• --to - option standing for “to”, is followed by the output format;
• --standalone - option standing for “standalone”, produces output with an appropriate header and footer;
• -o - option for file output

Pandoc - Convert from HTML to wiki

pandoc --from html5 --to mediawiki input.html -o output.wiki

Pandoc - converting to ePub

Simple:

pandoc --from html --to epub3 input.html --output=mybook.epub

Advanced (including stylesheet, cover image, chapter level ):

pandoc --from html --to epub3 input.html --output=mybook.epub --epub-stylesheet=styles.css --epub-cover-image=cover.jpg --epub-chapter-level=1

• --epub-stylesheet - CSS file that will style the Epub
• --epub-cover-image - cover file - can either be .jpg or .png
• --epub-chapter-level - at what heading level will the chapter brakes occur

Epub An editable format

Calibre's edit book function to 

• open an epub
• navigate structure 
• change content, style, metadata
• the issue of good reader apps

Self-contained HTML

• Example of a multimedia e-zine with animated GIFs and sound
• Look at the source code
• What is a data URI?
• What can you do better with self-contained HTML, what can you do better EPUB?

converting to PDF

A complicated case.

Different approaches tried:

• Research on ICML & inDesign
• Pandoc via LaTeX/XeTeX
• Weasyprint(HTML + CSS) Research on Weasyprint