Re: [CODE4LIB] An alternate presentation of Code4Lib Journal
As Peter notes below, Anthologize is a WordPress 3 plugin -- and I should add in a alpha release state -- so a WP 3 install where you can install plug-ins is a pre-requisite. But it does have a feed importer, so given a complete RSS feed it would provide a relatively plain ePub output option. There's a download on the Anthologize site Peter linked to; the code is at https://github.com/chnm/anthologize/. (Incidentally, I'll be talking about One Week | One Tool development process Anthologize came out of at code4lib 2011). -- Scott Scott Hanrath shanr...@ku.edu On 1/3/11 3:23 PM, Peter Murray peter.mur...@lyrasis.org wrote: I wonder if something like Anthologize -- http://anthologize.org/ -- would be useful for doing this. From its About page: Anthologize is a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including ‹ in this release ‹ PDF, ePUB, TEI. Peter -- Peter Murray peter.mur...@lyrasis.orgtel:+1-678-235-2955 Ass't Director, Technology Services Development http://dltj.org/about/ Lyrasis --Great Libraries. Strong Communities. Innovative Answers. The Disruptive Library Technology Jesterhttp://dltj.org/ Attrib-Noncomm-Share http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Re: [CODE4LIB] An alternate presentation of Code4Lib Journal
The Journal actually is hosted on WordPress, although I'm not sure if it's a recent enough version for the plug-in. I had the impression looking at it before that Anthologize would only make an 'anthology' of your entire wordpress site. Is there any easy way to get it to, for instance, make an anthology of all the posts with a certain WordPress tag or category instead? That's what we'd want for the C4L Journal. I guess if it can take a feed, you could point it at the feed for a specific category/tag, but I'm betting it works better when it's actually functioning as a wordpress plugin integrated with the content it's exporting. In general, one of the hardest part of exporting our WordPress articles in other formats seems to be dealing with the in-line images, code-samples, tables, etc. Jonathan On 1/4/2011 11:35 AM, Hanrath, Scott wrote: As Peter notes below, Anthologize is a WordPress 3 plugin -- and I should add in a alpha release state -- so a WP 3 install where you can install plug-ins is a pre-requisite. But it does have a feed importer, so given a complete RSS feed it would provide a relatively plain ePub output option. There's a download on the Anthologize site Peter linked to; the code is at https://github.com/chnm/anthologize/. (Incidentally, I'll be talking about One Week | One Tool development process Anthologize came out of at code4lib 2011). -- Scott Scott Hanrath shanr...@ku.edu On 1/3/11 3:23 PM, Peter Murraypeter.mur...@lyrasis.org wrote: I wonder if something like Anthologize -- http://anthologize.org/ -- would be useful for doing this. From its About page: Anthologize is a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including ‹ in this release ‹ PDF, ePUB, TEI. Peter -- Peter Murray peter.mur...@lyrasis.orgtel:+1-678-235-2955 Ass't Director, Technology Services Development http://dltj.org/about/ Lyrasis --Great Libraries. Strong Communities. Innovative Answers. The Disruptive Library Technology Jesterhttp://dltj.org/ Attrib-Noncomm-Share http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Re: [CODE4LIB] An alternate presentation of Code4Lib Journal
As I recall, one of the editors mentioned Anthologize a while back and, at the time, we decided it wasn't a super good fit. Perhaps we ought to reconsider. We're running WordPress 3.0.4, so that's not an issue. On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 11:45 AM, Eric Lease Morgan emor...@nd.edu wrote: On Jan 4, 2011, at 11:40 AM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote: ...Is there any easy way to get it to, for instance, make an anthology of all the posts with a certain WordPress tag or category instead?... Based on my (poor) recollection of playing with the Anthologize plug-in, the process is a bit manual. Initialize epub. Drag postings to it. Annotate/tweak titles. Click 'Go'. Get epub file. The process is not laborious, just a bit tedious. I would definitely recommend the Journal Committee experiment with Anthologize. -- Eric Morgan
Re: [CODE4LIB] An alternate presentation of Code4Lib Journal
Anthologize lets you be as picky as you like about the content you use with it. Essentially you create multiple Anthologize 'projects', then add the whatever subset of content you need (native local WordPress content or content imported via a feed) to the project. The Anthologize content is added as copies, preserving the originals and allowing for editing specific to your output needs. Eric's right that it *is* manual and a bit tedious, but it's (hopefully) getting less so. You do need to created a 'part' structure within your project to organize your content. But when adding content you can filter by Tag/Category/Date Range/Post Type. And with the last release you can add more than one post at a time. The Anthologize dev team would certainly be interested in the code4lib journal committee's take on the tool and ways it could be improved. (Support for automated project creation and output generation would an interesting feature to see on the roadmap). -- Scott On 1/4/11 10:45 AM, Eric Lease Morgan emor...@nd.edu wrote: On Jan 4, 2011, at 11:40 AM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote: ...Is there any easy way to get it to, for instance, make an anthology of all the posts with a certain WordPress tag or category instead?... Based on my (poor) recollection of playing with the Anthologize plug-in, the process is a bit manual. Initialize epub. Drag postings to it. Annotate/tweak titles. Click 'Go'. Get epub file. The process is not laborious, just a bit tedious. I would definitely recommend the Journal Committee experiment with Anthologize. -- Eric Morgan
Re: [CODE4LIB] An alternate presentation of Code4Lib Journal
Given my journal2epub script's experience with the Code4Lib journal site, does Anthologize have an option to produce TOC items from post headings, modifying the HTML to add IDs where necessary? Does it map links to posts with their offline copies, preserving references? Does it try to add the largest image it can, or does it include only embedded, potentially smaller ones? (In iBooks, unlike Adobe-based readers, you can double-tap to zoom in on an automatically resized large image.) Are metadata and stylesheets specified manually? And finally, does it clean up the HTML to produce strict XHTML 1.1 as required? In the journal's case, I had to process HTML three times with manual checks to delete invalid attributes before things would mostly validate. (Turns out validation is the hardest thing about automatically producing EPUB files.) As to my script's use in producing official EPUB files, sure, that's why I made it. But if you look closely, it makes assumptions about the HTML structure of the pages, so it might need modifications if the design or templates change. Louis. Sent from my iPhone On 2011-01-04, at 12:01 PM, Hanrath, Scott shanr...@ku.edu wrote: Anthologize lets you be as picky as you like about the content you use with it. Essentially you create multiple Anthologize 'projects', then add the whatever subset of content you need (native local WordPress content or content imported via a feed) to the project. The Anthologize content is added as copies, preserving the originals and allowing for editing specific to your output needs. Eric's right that it *is* manual and a bit tedious, but it's (hopefully) getting less so. You do need to created a 'part' structure within your project to organize your content. But when adding content you can filter by Tag/Category/Date Range/Post Type. And with the last release you can add more than one post at a time. The Anthologize dev team would certainly be interested in the code4lib journal committee's take on the tool and ways it could be improved. (Support for automated project creation and output generation would an interesting feature to see on the roadmap). -- Scott On 1/4/11 10:45 AM, Eric Lease Morgan emor...@nd.edu wrote: On Jan 4, 2011, at 11:40 AM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote: ...Is there any easy way to get it to, for instance, make an anthology of all the posts with a certain WordPress tag or category instead?... Based on my (poor) recollection of playing with the Anthologize plug-in, the process is a bit manual. Initialize epub. Drag postings to it. Annotate/tweak titles. Click 'Go'. Get epub file. The process is not laborious, just a bit tedious. I would definitely recommend the Journal Committee experiment with Anthologize. -- Eric Morgan
Re: [CODE4LIB] An alternate presentation of Code4Lib Journal
If there are particular HTML errors you encountered as a pattern in the journal website, please feel free to let us know about them on the Journal listserv, if you're interested. On 1/4/2011 12:30 PM, Louis St-Amour wrote: Given my journal2epub script's experience with the Code4Lib journal site, does Anthologize have an option to produce TOC items from post headings, modifying the HTML to add IDs where necessary? Does it map links to posts with their offline copies, preserving references? Does it try to add the largest image it can, or does it include only embedded, potentially smaller ones? (In iBooks, unlike Adobe-based readers, you can double-tap to zoom in on an automatically resized large image.) Are metadata and stylesheets specified manually? And finally, does it clean up the HTML to produce strict XHTML 1.1 as required? In the journal's case, I had to process HTML three times with manual checks to delete invalid attributes before things would mostly validate. (Turns out validation is the hardest thing about automatically producing EPUB files.) As to my script's use in producing official EPUB files, sure, that's why I made it. But if you look closely, it makes assumptions about the HTML structure of the pages, so it might need modifications if the design or templates change. Louis. Sent from my iPhone On 2011-01-04, at 12:01 PM, Hanrath, Scottshanr...@ku.edu wrote: Anthologize lets you be as picky as you like about the content you use with it. Essentially you create multiple Anthologize 'projects', then add the whatever subset of content you need (native local WordPress content or content imported via a feed) to the project. The Anthologize content is added as copies, preserving the originals and allowing for editing specific to your output needs. Eric's right that it *is* manual and a bit tedious, but it's (hopefully) getting less so. You do need to created a 'part' structure within your project to organize your content. But when adding content you can filter by Tag/Category/Date Range/Post Type. And with the last release you can add more than one post at a time. The Anthologize dev team would certainly be interested in the code4lib journal committee's take on the tool and ways it could be improved. (Support for automated project creation and output generation would an interesting feature to see on the roadmap). -- Scott On 1/4/11 10:45 AM, Eric Lease Morganemor...@nd.edu wrote: On Jan 4, 2011, at 11:40 AM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote: ...Is there any easy way to get it to, for instance, make an anthology of all the posts with a certain WordPress tag or category instead?... Based on my (poor) recollection of playing with the Anthologize plug-in, the process is a bit manual. Initialize epub. Drag postings to it. Annotate/tweak titles. Click 'Go'. Get epub file. The process is not laborious, just a bit tedious. I would definitely recommend the Journal Committee experiment with Anthologize. -- Eric Morgan
Re: [CODE4LIB] An alternate presentation of Code4Lib Journal
I wonder if something like Anthologize -- http://anthologize.org/ -- would be useful for doing this. From its About page: Anthologize is a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including — in this release — PDF, ePUB, TEI. Peter -- Peter Murray peter.mur...@lyrasis.orgtel:+1-678-235-2955 Ass't Director, Technology Services Development http://dltj.org/about/ Lyrasis --Great Libraries. Strong Communities. Innovative Answers. The Disruptive Library Technology Jesterhttp://dltj.org/ Attrib-Noncomm-Share http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Re: [CODE4LIB] An alternate presentation of Code4Lib Journal
Sweet, if you have an automated process that produces these reliably, or once you do, please let us know on the Journal list, and we'll see if we can integrate it into our regular production process and provide links to epubs from the journal home pages. From: Code for Libraries [code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Louis St-Amour [louisstam...@gmail.com] Sent: Sunday, January 02, 2011 5:06 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] An alternate presentation of Code4Lib Journal Sorry to deprive you of the challenge Greg, but I've made epub versions (automatically) of issues 1 through 12. Right after epub was first mentioned, I starting considering how I'd go about converting the site to an epub package. Of course the holidays intervened, but given it's Jan 2, I put some spare time towards it et voila! Download a first draft of the journal in epub here: https://github.com/LouisStAmour/journal2epub/downloads Site maintainers may be interested in the error logs. Look for lines saying referenced resource missing in package. Sometimes it's my fault (e.g. an absolute image reference I missed in 3.epub) and sometimes it's a typo (e.g. a link to drupal.org that actually points to a href= in an issue 12 reference). Before posting these epub files live on the site, we should run through the logs to fix things, perhaps hand-tweak and recompile the HTML as epub, make sure images are sized correctly on non-iBooks readers (e.g. my Sony Reader), perhaps add cover art, copyright table of contents with abstracts. Source code is mostly one file (it hasn't been refactored), under MIT license (from Expat): https://github.com/LouisStAmour/journal2epub/blob/master/journal2epub.rb Louis St-Amour York University Digital Media BA student Osgoode Hall Law School student webmonkey http://www.lsta.me/ or on Twitter, @4Lou On Mon, Dec 27, 2010 at 12:42 AM, Greg Williams gwilli...@westlinnoregon.gov wrote: Karen's right, EPUB content is basically XHTML/CSS/graphics, so converting from web-EPUB shouldn't be that difficult. The hardest part would be properly constructing the required manifest/metadata XML files. After you do all that, creating an EPUB archive is basically a matter of packaging all the files into a ZIP archive and changing the file extension. If you already have the HTML/CSS/images, a tool like Calibre ( http://calibre- ebook.com/) should do a basic conversion. If you wanted to do a bit more customization, something like Sigil (http://code.google.com/p/sigil/) could also help simplify the task of gathering/organizing content, automatically creating required metadata/manifests, etc... I'm sure there are many other tools out there, those are just the two I've been playing with recently while preparing for an upcoming presentation on EPUB. I, for one, would welcome an EPUB version of the Code4Lib journal; I read Pragmatic Bookshelf (http://www.pragprog.com/magazines) and Hacker Monthly (http://hackermonthly.com/) every month in EPUB format (on an iPad), and really find the experience much more enjoyable/engaging than reading the same content in a browser on my desktop/laptop. Time permitting, I might be persuaded to put together a sample EPUB issue of the journal, if there was any interest... -Greg Williams West Linn Public Library gwilli...@westlinnoregon.gov On Sun, 26 Dec 2010 07:41:34 -0800, Karen Coyle li...@kcoyle.net wrote: Epub is essentially HTML at its root, which should make this easier. I think that the Internet Archive may have done this -- they are exporting books in ePub format. I'll forward this question to some folks there (rather than putting their emails in a public list). kc
Re: [CODE4LIB] An alternate presentation of Code4Lib Journal
I'm not a big fan, but it does make me consider what it would take to make an ePub version of each issue. Anyone have any knowledge/experience related to HTML-ePub conversion? Have a nice day, Jonathan On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 12:11 AM, Jonathan Rochkind rochk...@jhu.edu wrote: I'm not sure, there are definitely some tricks there. But if you do come up with some CSS that works robustly (your rough cut demo is doing some odd things, cutting text off in the middle of paragraphs, putting scrollbars in the middle of the page, etc), we at the journal would probably be happy to incorporate it in the main site as an option, perhaps a link somewhere to toggle between a multi-narrow-column and single-column view. A bit of WordPress hacking involved there too perhaps to provide such CSS toggle functionality. From: Code for Libraries [code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Louis St-Amour [louisstam...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, December 23, 2010 10:23 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: [CODE4LIB] An alternate presentation of Code4Lib Journal Hey all, Having recently discovered Code4Lib Journal, I was fooling around with columns as ways of making articles more interesting to read, perhaps eventually on tablet devices: [image: AltPresentation.jpg] Works best in (and in fact only tested on) Google Chrome on an iMac, but you can try it out for yourself at http://lsta.me/code4lib/ ... all I've done is mirrored the journal site and added some styles to the bottom of the WordPress theme's CSS file. In theory you could apply such styles via a web browser extension or user stylesheet to the website itself, live. But I wouldn't recommend it without further testing and tweaks. My main goal was to see if columns improved the reading experience on an iPad, and the answer is definitely a yes, because while I set the columns too small, you still get a sense of where you are overall and can see farther ahead with columns than when you zoom in on a single column webpage. The trouble with automatic columns, however, are defining when the automatic columns should break. So far, it's perhaps more trouble than it's worth in CSS, but with any luck that might change 10 years from now. It's funny how tablets in particular break our notions of page -- on tablets, we want essentially resizable and reflowing text columns but with fixed and pretty page layouts that we can navigate through. Consider magazines on the iPad -- sometimes we want the pretty text and images, but other times we want just text alone, or just images alone. And yet that means coming up with natural ways to zoom in on text and images without making the text unreadable or images blurry. It should be possible, but as far as I know, no one's done it right, yet. Either it's a Kindle-style text experience, or a magazine-style Image experience. I wonder who will mix the two together, first? Inkling almost gets it right with textbook content, but often feels like it's wasting space with its one-column infinite scroll approach. Which brings me back to my original point, I think columns and grids are crucial for helping people see more info at once. Anyone else have any thoughts on this? I was thinking about turning the Journal into an iPad/tablet app, given its Creative Commons license, but I now suspect given my interest in columns, that I'd be laying it out in InDesign first, like a real magazine, which might be too much work. Louis. -- Jonathan M. Brinley jonathanbrin...@gmail.com http://xplus3.net/
Re: [CODE4LIB] An alternate presentation of Code4Lib Journal
AFAIK, there is no direct print to ePub utility at this time. There are several tools that will convert PDF to ePub, and myriad print to PDF tools. Most decent operating systems have the ability to print to PDF inbuilt. The hard part in getting web pages into a decent format. Since the Journal has a relatively simple layout, it does print cleanly to a PDF. Since the Journal is on WordPress, pagination and layout can be managed using a plugin like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/printfriendly/. Of course, adding a plugin like this would make it possible for any user to print to a PDF on demand, and deal with the layout (or not deal with the layout) any way they like. Getting it into either a reflowable PDF or an ePub format would still require dedicated effort either by the end-user of by the Code4Lib Journal crew. Thanks, Cary On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 4:21 AM, Jonathan Brinley jonathanbrin...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not a big fan, but it does make me consider what it would take to make an ePub version of each issue. Anyone have any knowledge/experience related to HTML-ePub conversion? Have a nice day, Jonathan On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 12:11 AM, Jonathan Rochkind rochk...@jhu.edu wrote: I'm not sure, there are definitely some tricks there. But if you do come up with some CSS that works robustly (your rough cut demo is doing some odd things, cutting text off in the middle of paragraphs, putting scrollbars in the middle of the page, etc), we at the journal would probably be happy to incorporate it in the main site as an option, perhaps a link somewhere to toggle between a multi-narrow-column and single-column view. A bit of WordPress hacking involved there too perhaps to provide such CSS toggle functionality. From: Code for Libraries [code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Louis St-Amour [louisstam...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, December 23, 2010 10:23 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: [CODE4LIB] An alternate presentation of Code4Lib Journal Hey all, Having recently discovered Code4Lib Journal, I was fooling around with columns as ways of making articles more interesting to read, perhaps eventually on tablet devices: [image: AltPresentation.jpg] Works best in (and in fact only tested on) Google Chrome on an iMac, but you can try it out for yourself at http://lsta.me/code4lib/ ... all I've done is mirrored the journal site and added some styles to the bottom of the WordPress theme's CSS file. In theory you could apply such styles via a web browser extension or user stylesheet to the website itself, live. But I wouldn't recommend it without further testing and tweaks. My main goal was to see if columns improved the reading experience on an iPad, and the answer is definitely a yes, because while I set the columns too small, you still get a sense of where you are overall and can see farther ahead with columns than when you zoom in on a single column webpage. The trouble with automatic columns, however, are defining when the automatic columns should break. So far, it's perhaps more trouble than it's worth in CSS, but with any luck that might change 10 years from now. It's funny how tablets in particular break our notions of page -- on tablets, we want essentially resizable and reflowing text columns but with fixed and pretty page layouts that we can navigate through. Consider magazines on the iPad -- sometimes we want the pretty text and images, but other times we want just text alone, or just images alone. And yet that means coming up with natural ways to zoom in on text and images without making the text unreadable or images blurry. It should be possible, but as far as I know, no one's done it right, yet. Either it's a Kindle-style text experience, or a magazine-style Image experience. I wonder who will mix the two together, first? Inkling almost gets it right with textbook content, but often feels like it's wasting space with its one-column infinite scroll approach. Which brings me back to my original point, I think columns and grids are crucial for helping people see more info at once. Anyone else have any thoughts on this? I was thinking about turning the Journal into an iPad/tablet app, given its Creative Commons license, but I now suspect given my interest in columns, that I'd be laying it out in InDesign first, like a real magazine, which might be too much work. Louis. -- Jonathan M. Brinley jonathanbrin...@gmail.com http://xplus3.net/ -- Cary Gordon The Cherry Hill Company http://chillco.com
Re: [CODE4LIB] An alternate presentation of Code4Lib Journal
Epub is essentially HTML at its root, which should make this easier. I think that the Internet Archive may have done this -- they are exporting books in ePub format. I'll forward this question to some folks there (rather than putting their emails in a public list). kc Quoting Jonathan Brinley jonathanbrin...@gmail.com: I'm not a big fan, but it does make me consider what it would take to make an ePub version of each issue. Anyone have any knowledge/experience related to HTML-ePub conversion? Have a nice day, Jonathan On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 12:11 AM, Jonathan Rochkind rochk...@jhu.edu wrote: I'm not sure, there are definitely some tricks there. But if you do come up with some CSS that works robustly (your rough cut demo is doing some odd things, cutting text off in the middle of paragraphs, putting scrollbars in the middle of the page, etc), we at the journal would probably be happy to incorporate it in the main site as an option, perhaps a link somewhere to toggle between a multi-narrow-column and single-column view. A bit of WordPress hacking involved there too perhaps to provide such CSS toggle functionality. From: Code for Libraries [code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Louis St-Amour [louisstam...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, December 23, 2010 10:23 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: [CODE4LIB] An alternate presentation of Code4Lib Journal Hey all, Having recently discovered Code4Lib Journal, I was fooling around with columns as ways of making articles more interesting to read, perhaps eventually on tablet devices: [image: AltPresentation.jpg] Works best in (and in fact only tested on) Google Chrome on an iMac, but you can try it out for yourself at http://lsta.me/code4lib/ ... all I've done is mirrored the journal site and added some styles to the bottom of the WordPress theme's CSS file. In theory you could apply such styles via a web browser extension or user stylesheet to the website itself, live. But I wouldn't recommend it without further testing and tweaks. My main goal was to see if columns improved the reading experience on an iPad, and the answer is definitely a yes, because while I set the columns too small, you still get a sense of where you are overall and can see farther ahead with columns than when you zoom in on a single column webpage. The trouble with automatic columns, however, are defining when the automatic columns should break. So far, it's perhaps more trouble than it's worth in CSS, but with any luck that might change 10 years from now. It's funny how tablets in particular break our notions of page -- on tablets, we want essentially resizable and reflowing text columns but with fixed and pretty page layouts that we can navigate through. Consider magazines on the iPad -- sometimes we want the pretty text and images, but other times we want just text alone, or just images alone. And yet that means coming up with natural ways to zoom in on text and images without making the text unreadable or images blurry. It should be possible, but as far as I know, no one's done it right, yet. Either it's a Kindle-style text experience, or a magazine-style Image experience. I wonder who will mix the two together, first? Inkling almost gets it right with textbook content, but often feels like it's wasting space with its one-column infinite scroll approach. Which brings me back to my original point, I think columns and grids are crucial for helping people see more info at once. Anyone else have any thoughts on this? I was thinking about turning the Journal into an iPad/tablet app, given its Creative Commons license, but I now suspect given my interest in columns, that I'd be laying it out in InDesign first, like a real magazine, which might be too much work. Louis. -- Jonathan M. Brinley jonathanbrin...@gmail.com http://xplus3.net/ -- Karen Coyle kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet
Re: [CODE4LIB] An alternate presentation of Code4Lib Journal
I'm not sure, there are definitely some tricks there. But if you do come up with some CSS that works robustly (your rough cut demo is doing some odd things, cutting text off in the middle of paragraphs, putting scrollbars in the middle of the page, etc), we at the journal would probably be happy to incorporate it in the main site as an option, perhaps a link somewhere to toggle between a multi-narrow-column and single-column view. A bit of WordPress hacking involved there too perhaps to provide such CSS toggle functionality. From: Code for Libraries [code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Louis St-Amour [louisstam...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, December 23, 2010 10:23 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: [CODE4LIB] An alternate presentation of Code4Lib Journal Hey all, Having recently discovered Code4Lib Journal, I was fooling around with columns as ways of making articles more interesting to read, perhaps eventually on tablet devices: [image: AltPresentation.jpg] Works best in (and in fact only tested on) Google Chrome on an iMac, but you can try it out for yourself at http://lsta.me/code4lib/ ... all I've done is mirrored the journal site and added some styles to the bottom of the WordPress theme's CSS file. In theory you could apply such styles via a web browser extension or user stylesheet to the website itself, live. But I wouldn't recommend it without further testing and tweaks. My main goal was to see if columns improved the reading experience on an iPad, and the answer is definitely a yes, because while I set the columns too small, you still get a sense of where you are overall and can see farther ahead with columns than when you zoom in on a single column webpage. The trouble with automatic columns, however, are defining when the automatic columns should break. So far, it's perhaps more trouble than it's worth in CSS, but with any luck that might change 10 years from now. It's funny how tablets in particular break our notions of page -- on tablets, we want essentially resizable and reflowing text columns but with fixed and pretty page layouts that we can navigate through. Consider magazines on the iPad -- sometimes we want the pretty text and images, but other times we want just text alone, or just images alone. And yet that means coming up with natural ways to zoom in on text and images without making the text unreadable or images blurry. It should be possible, but as far as I know, no one's done it right, yet. Either it's a Kindle-style text experience, or a magazine-style Image experience. I wonder who will mix the two together, first? Inkling almost gets it right with textbook content, but often feels like it's wasting space with its one-column infinite scroll approach. Which brings me back to my original point, I think columns and grids are crucial for helping people see more info at once. Anyone else have any thoughts on this? I was thinking about turning the Journal into an iPad/tablet app, given its Creative Commons license, but I now suspect given my interest in columns, that I'd be laying it out in InDesign first, like a real magazine, which might be too much work. Louis.
