Editing Research/all-in-one publishing (section)

== Challenges ==

Because we are off the beaten tracks for the duration of this research, we encountered many challenges that didn't have readily available solutions. We will discuss the challenges for every step of our process:

=== From Word to HTML ===
At this stage, we encountered very little problems. Pandoc proved easy to install and worked flawlessly.

=== Cleaning up the HTML ===
In Word, there are basically two methods to style a document: '''using styles or by manually changing the font properties''' for every heading and paragraph. The first method results in html files with a better (semantic) structure, because the styles can directly translated to HTML tags. The second method creates very messy HTML files that require lots of cleaning because the HTML is littered with unnecessary styling information. The documents that we used as the source were somewhere in between: most styling was done correctly, but a lot of manual cleaning was still needed. Additionally, most '''figures had to be extracted manually'''.

=== Adding semantic structure and classes ===
Before we started adding this information to the HTML, we walked through the publication. Together we decided what would be the correct semantic structure and added this as annotations to the file. We could then work in a parallel fashion, individually implementing the structure in the html files. An issue we encountered while defining the structure is that most semantic HTML elements are aimed at the web, so deciding on a suitable semantic structure for both print and web was often a matter of compromise. Because we knew what design we were aiming at, it was easier for us to decide what elements should have classes and which should not. If the design is not ready yet, this may be more of a challenge and will probably change during the course of the project.

[[File:Pdf annotations.jpg]]

=== Creating the CSS ===
This was by far the most challenging part of this project, so we will discuss the challenges separately for every output format.

==== Web CSS ====
For the website, the whole design of the book had to be reimagined. Pages do not exist, information doesn't have to be linear and many interactive posibilities open up. We decided to keep the website largely linear because it seemed to fit the content well. Some interactivity was added: the index was redesigned to become a navigation menu and the footnotes were made into toolips. Because the font (Metric) was not licensed for online use, we had to find a font that was similar. This proved to be very difficult, so we had to compromise. We tried to avoid using javascript when possible, as this can decrease compatibility and increase the complexity of the code. The only exception we made was for the footnotes, because this was simply not possible in CSS. Numbering of figures, pages and tables was also done in CSS. This turned out to work out quite well, although browser support is somewhat limited. At a later stage we realized that this may not have been the optimal solution, since this numbering is vital information and not just a matter of styling.

==== Responsive web CSS ====
Instead of creating a separate mobile output, we made the regular website responsive to screen size. The challenges we encountered while doing this were not much different from the challenges that come with all mobile websites. Even though these challenges also belong to our research topic, they do not represent the most innovative aspects of it. For this reason, documentation regarding this output seems redundant to us.

==== Epub CSS ====
Epub stylesheets proved to be very badly documented. Every device has its own interpretation of CSS, and almost all of them are quite limited. Advanced CSS like numbering works on almost none of the available devices. 

We used Pandoc to create the epub, and one limitation was that pandoc can only add one stylesheet. We divided the stylesheet files into a global stylesheet, a print stylesheet and a specific epub stylesheet, all of which should be used for the epub. To solve this, we used a command line utility to merge these stylesheets and save them as one, so that we could use the resulting css for Pandoc.

This resulted in the following command for windows:

<source lang="winbatch">
type "css\style.css" "css\epub.css" "css\print.css" > "css\epub_composite.css"
pandoc container.html -o book.epub --epub-cover-image=img\cover.jpg --epub-stylesheet=css\epub_composite.css
</source>
==== Print CSS ====
Because one of our team member had good experiences in the past with Chrome's print functionality, this was the browser we used for testing. This turned out to be a mistake, because lately Chrome's printing functionality has deteriorated (possibly caused by their change of rendering engine). Many hours were wasted on trying to get the design to work on Chrome, after which we decided to focus on firefox. This proved to be much easier, and most CSS worked correctly.

==== Prince CSS ====

None of the team members had used PrinceXML before, so the process was pretty much 'trial and error' in the begining. There were issues with the CSS files being used for the web version. They had to be imported in the CSS file used for Prince (even though they were being requested in the HTML head).
[[File:Prince01.png | 390px]]<br>
The HTML head, where the CSS files are requested).
<br><br>
[[File:Prince02.png]]<br>
The import command in prince.css (seems redundant but is actually necessary).
<br><br>

Prince has some useful features, such as retrieving content from HTML elements and assigning them to variables (useful if you need to use a Chapter's title in the page footer, for example).

One possible downside is that Prince XML is proprietary software.

To use Prince, a command like the one below is needed:
<source lang="bash">
prince container.html -s css/prince.css book.pdf
</source>

Documentation on how to use and install PrinceXML can be found here: http://www.princexml.com/doc/

==== Weasyprint CSS ====

Weasyprint works similarly to PrinceXML. However, it is not proprietary software. It is trickyer to install when compared to Prince and does not have all the features that we found in PrinceXML.

<source lang="bash">
weasyprint container.html -s css/weasyprint.css weasybook_final.pdf
</source>

Documentation:
* how to install http://weasyprint.org/docs/install/#by-platform
* command-line API http://weasyprint.org/docs/api/#command-line-api

=== Collaboration ===
We worked in parallel on the different outputs, which worked well but sometimes caused little hickups. The most common problem was caused by the fact that we used multiple css stylesheet for every output. For example, when one person was working on the print stylesheet, this could accidentally break the pdf export.