Tuesday 12 May 2009 16:30:32

Page2pub is a HP supported project at OPL. Taking the web to other media including print this project might come in support of the earlier idea of print being the secret weapon of the web. The idea of the web as the people’s prime content container is contestable, while exporting it to non-networked media is a usable idea though for distribution opportunities, yet taking into account every media-specific property and compare between formats. After web gathering also other digital (local, individual) content gathering can be supported.

Tuesday 12 May 2009 16:06:15

Patricia Albanese, Matthew Bernius, Tona Henderson and Michael Riordan of Open Publishing Lab (OPL) at Rochester Institute of Technology present Taking Open Source publishing further.

People create content — they are today’s media creators, they have stories to tell. OPL aims at three E’s: Extend, Enable and Empower publishing possibilities for a consumer, non-technology savvy audience. For this purpose they develop a web based Open Publishing Guide to facilitate decision making for conception and production of DIY publication.

Tuesday 12 May 2009 15:37:24

Actually van Blokland’s automated design (design=print x pixel is his final claim — where it seems that pixel stands for the possibility of digital manipulation and print for the fixing of what would be an necessity out of the sea of possibilities) philosophy provides form follows function with a variation: form follows code.

Tuesday 12 May 2009 15:16:57

For Petr van Bloklands c.s. web programming environment see xierpa.com.

Tuesday 12 May 2009 15:08:18

Petr van Blokland is a programming (graphic) designer and the conference’s second afternoon speaker. (Graphic) design for technological change is an uncertain craft. How to keep up with changing standards and display device gadgetry? Trying to give content a readable face and add value to it, whichever way you look at it, depends on some kind of programming, as systematic process management. First of all any programming, or preparing (planning) the design steps is about asking the right questions, and coming up with definitions — what actually are design, programming, print, pixel?

Design as a (communication) problem solving intervention technically meets with infinite solutions, gathering from infinite design sources and assets. Option overload, van Blokland calls it. Grouping sources and assets, grouping shapes and fonts and colors and other (visual) components, are at the outset of design as a solution to design demands. Organizing one’s material and planning the design strategy can be like a game. Programming as non-linear thinking develops rules to manage design assets and solutions, guiding the process. Programming provides an organizational intervention into data abundance. Then code, even a couple of lines of it, can generate an endless variety of forms and colors and typeface variations in which choice is more of less built in, since the programme grows from the specific design challenge and your own ideas and concepts.

Tuesday 12 May 2009 14:15:53

What can be the next tool for crafting electronic and print publications from a single source of data and metadata? Openmute’s Simon Worthington, who speaks tomorrow, asks. There’s no answer to it. If Gerrit Imsieke knew, his company would be developing it. Indeed the tool challenge runs through the conference on the technical side. Engineering from ink on paper to pixels on a screen runs up against more labor intensive problems than the other way around. Yet the true tool challenge is in open content management and design standards which allow for multiple publishing formats, on multiple devices, from the same set of data.

Tuesday 12 May 2009 14:04:12

Future publications should develop from single source (XML) data allowing free decisions between printed and electronic publications and cross referencing between media. Paginating allows for easy referencing, which reflowable documents do not support. In other words: you can not link from a printed page to a specific paragraph in an e-book, as easily as you can refer to a web document from a printed document, with its url.

Tuesday 12 May 2009 13:49:58

Tough (and costly, especially if done manually) issues in conversion from existing printed publications into e-books are in dealing with font encoding, linearization, dehyphenation, and markup e.g. for navigation between main text and footnotes or internal document linking. Index creation is another of those tough problems. While ‘paper is patient’ as the saying goes, electronic documents demand patience from its engineers.

Tuesday 12 May 2009 13:37:54

Gerrit Imsieke of Leipzig based le-tex publishing services is the afternoon’s first speaker. They produced/published 300 e-books in .epub format (and some 1500 .pdf publications optimized for the web) and call their line of business content engineering. Florian Cramer actually had a hard time to find an e-book producing company. The talk is about how to engineer e-content into usable publications. The two flavors in e-books are paginated .pdf and reflowable e.g. epub, or Mobipocket, or LIT. Imsieke sees a format war between Amazon and epub. One of the crucial usability questions, apart from ones mentioned in earlier posts (like annotation and search), is how much interactivity the user is allowed with the electronic publishing format. Especially important in knowledge publications, which would ideally allow some testing of the user’s comprehension of the published material, would be some sort of questioning/answering possibility. Epub, being in full development, does not yet allow any of such document-internal interactivity, but linking and embedded flash solutions.

Engineering content encounters content coding (XHTML 1.1) and design (CSS 2) issues for text and image (JPG, PNG, SVG); mark-up with metadata for e.g. a table of contents and search facility is another challenge, embeddable font availability is a design issue, zip packaging conditional to uploading-transportation. All of these allowing reflowable e-publications.

Tuesday 12 May 2009 12:30:31

Sony’s Marc Regeur’s closing words are a lesson to anyone in publishing (innovation): we should learn from our mistakes… An open public short list for mistakes-that-teach-us in any new content-design-device development would serve any media publishing’s progress. Maybe the Willem de Kooning’s digital media research groups could set it up for us?