Publication Quality Contents Using Tiddlywiki

[Mohammad]

Is it possible to configure tiddlers for preparing high quality contents and print to pdf?

This because I want to see if there is any experience to use Tiddlywiki like Ms Word or Latex

for preparing publication quality contents?

Any idea / sharing experiences / resources are appreciated!

In my opinion we need some tools, some are already ready as plugin for Tiddlywiki!

Mohammad

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: the methodology needs a few decent cases in order to see how to do it well.

Explanation: TW explicitly organised for optimal print needs one to think about ...

• what does the final printed format need to look like?
• how should the contents be organised, fielded?

Design Issues:

• For instance, if you write documents that are scholarly that need footnotes, a design decision would be "are the note references hard-coded or dynamically created?"
  
• How much do you use dynamic CSS for, for instance, section numbering? Or rely on macros, or both?
• For academic work conventional "style manuals" like the Chicago Manual Of Style or the APA system could be used ... replicated in CSS.
  
• Do you need to create printable documents at will, combining different Tiddlers at different times?

Support Tools:

• Thomas Elmiger's BRICKS plugin is a potentially very useful tool for precise development of Print CSS.
• BTC's PRINT-RIVER is a tool that can be a great aid to organising what to print.

Just initial thoughts

Josiah

[Jan]

Hi Mohammad,
for me the biggest problem in using TW for scientific publications was footnotes. Thomas Elminger helped me with a plugin to solve this:
http://slidesnstories.tiddlyspot.com/#About%20Footnotes.
There you also find my variant of Alberto Molinas ScholarTabs which is called MetaTabs and the storysaver Plugin which allows to save sets of tiddlers and reload the to the story.

Cheers Jan

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tiddlywiki+...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to tiddl...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/3375c254-0f00-4b1f-8ae5-8643f1bd6e5b%40googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Alex Hough]

I was thinking about the same, only making a print magazine

Its about matching the tiddler size to the paper size, in my case each page would be A5

any thoughts on how to make a muti-page booklet?

Alex

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/5BF2D119.6060209%40googlemail.com.

[Jeremy Ruston]

On 20 Nov 2018, at 12:14, Alex Hough <r.a....@gmail.com> wrote:

any thoughts on how to make a muti-page booklet?

It’s not quite what you want, but I’ve always loved the venerable TiddlyPocketBook:

https://blog.whatfettle.com/2010/09/15/tiddlypocketbook/

Best wishes

Jeremy

[Ste Wilson]

Alas it seems to have vanished with tiddlyspace...

[Jeremy Ruston]

The waybackmachine to the rescue:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100225222805/http://tiddlypocketbook.com:80/

Best wishes

Jeremy

[Alex Hough]

i remember that!

it must be a lot easier now --with new CSS rotate and all that

Alex

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tiddlywiki+...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to tiddl...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/2A267E6F-9583-4429-8F96-4026C978FF36%40gmail.com.

[Jeremy Ruston]

Hi Alex

On 20 Nov 2018, at 12:49, Alex Hough <r.a....@gmail.com> wrote:

it must be a lot easier now --with new CSS rotate and all that

Surprisingly, CSS Transforms appeared in 2008, first on Safari, and then other browsers over the following 2 years.

Best wishes

Jeremy

[Mohammad]

Dear all,

 Many thanks for your comments and ideas!

1. I understood we can set the paper size and margin using css. I tested this using conditional css (https://tiddlywiki.com/prerelease/#Custom%20Styles%20FAQ)
2. For printing into high quality pdf or printers, the print-river plugin seems to work but it needs to be improved
3. The footnot plugin is good for start but we need to be able for scientific citation and be able to use Mendely (https://www.mendeley.com/?interaction_required=true) or similar from web. It seems we can also do this using some plugins
4. For math, we can use the Katex plugin! It works greats

Special thanks to Josiah for discussing this in depth!

I believe, TW has enough potential to replace MS words and similar for small scale contents like booklets, articles (I mean scholarly)

Cheers

Mohammad

[Mohammad]

Josiah,

 Thank you for your great comments!

I raised this question to draw attention to TW potential for preparing high quality contents (I myself am interested in scholarly and journal quality contents).

I worked for several months to prepare some codes for creating contents using tiddlers in some logical order, able to close and reopen them as a story (as article, booklet, tutorial,...), number them as pages, print them in order, and so on...

It seems CSS3 is quite powerful and lets us to customize tiddlers easily!

The very powerful class field in TW 5.1.18 (I found it there) let us create pages in custom size, margins, font, etc...

Still there is a problem, the philosophy behind tiddlers is to have them to store the smallest meaningful chunk of data! So, I am not sure if TW can be used effectively for creating scholarly articles or even writing a novel in a series!

What I like in TW is, it let me to explore the power of html5 +CSS3. It lets me for quick prototyping and I could not find a rival tool to do that!

I hope people, specially developers and super users here in this group create and develop tools to let us use TW in this area.

Cheers

Mohammad

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Mohammad

I had quick look at the Mendeley citation and citation style manager. The part of it concerned with citation style (inline indicators) and endnote/footnotes (the full references) does look doable in TW. I think the issue would be whether you independently, one by one, support a citation style or go for something that can manage and switch between multiple types. Having ability to switch styles would be neat but a lot more complicated. In this case its not just CSS you'd have to cope with but also with developing a generalisable "meta" data-structure.

Best

Josiah

[Mohammad]

Josiah,

 Yes, you are right, at first we can go with manual and simple citation! A dictionary or a bibtex tiddler can store the references and a plugin can be used to cite!

I would also like to share this article! It is related to our discussion

Research Articles in Simplified HTML: a Web-first format for HTML-based scholarly articles

https://peerj.com/articles/cs-132/#supplemental-information

Mohammad

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Mohammad

I looked at that article. Its interesting and relevant in terms of aims.I think that in TW we can meet those aims eventually.

But I think its also good to think through the different aspects of academic Publishing AND Writing needs as they could work in TW.

The two, writing & publishing, are quite strongly related. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/tiddlywiki/B0VGpW27MC4/jTsvc1F6BAAJ

That thread on "Placeholders" had a number of interesting ideas and some prototype code for handling

the situation of the scholar, or fiction, writer whose main aim is smoother production of texts.

I have held off writing more about it--basically because I can't code--so before I ask for help I need get really clear what exactly I'm asking for.

But the "placeholder" seems a very good fit for being able to better develop emergent academic documents.

At the back of my mind is ability not just to create footnotes etc but also have more than one type

(for instance "notes" for expanding meanings; "citations" for bibliographic materials; and links to a "glossary" for definitions--all dynamically changeable).

I think that approach fits better with actual writing practice.

Just letting you know

Best, Josiah

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Mohammad, a comment on this ...

On Tuesday, 20 November 2018 14:54:06 UTC+1, Mohammad wrote:e

Still there is a problem, the philosophy behind tiddlers is to have them to store the smallest meaningful chunk of data! So, I am not sure if TW can be used effectively for creating scholarly articles or even writing a novel in a series!

... this idea does come up a lot but in a way its a misunderstanding.

That is easily demonstrated by asking yourself "Well what is the RELEVANT  size of a component Tiddler for my PURPOSE?" In fact TW as easily allows and supports large Tiddlers.

So whilst "fragment" (I.e. as a "part") could be Tiny, it could also be Huge. It depends on the purpose.

In narrative and academic writing it more likely your main units will be of considerable length.

Best wishes

Josiah

 

[Mohammad]

Hello Josiah,

 I found one more resources on preparing high quality contents using html+css! I think many of requested features can be found or implemented with TW

* https://www.princexml.com

-Mohammad 

[TonyM]

Mohammad et al,

I have being happy simply generating a bespoke tiddler that includes the content I want, it would be simple to decide when to display footnotes etc... on a page or at the end of the document/chapter.

Now of course the whole suite of features a professional author may want could be incorporated in one or more editions, and most of this is I believe only a matter of design with a few exceptions.

The key issue that I face is the ability to see a preview that allows one to see where page breaks will occur based on the printer pages and portrait and landscape modes that are only set once you get the printer driver selected. It is then possible to insert additional page breaks where you want them forced but you have to exit the print preview for this. It seems to me what we need is a way to preview content according to how it will be interpreted by the print driver, and make changes that will be saved into tiddlywiki so the document retains this structure in subsequent prints.

So what I am saying is whilst I stand to be corrected this is the only structural issue I can see that we need to resolve that I cant see the method to solve it, where as everything else seems to me to be a simple mater of design with our existing tools.

So I ask this question: Any idea how to solve this page sizing / break issue?

Beyond that, what standard could we use against which to develop the necessary components? I would be happy to share in knocking each of the list one by one.

eg: Footnotes and citations excerpt or full at bottom of every page, every second page, end of chapter or end of book?

Page headings and footers? eg; a generic tiddler used to structure each heading and footer, 

etc...

Regards

Tony

[Mohammad]

Hello Tony!

 Yes, this is a crucial feature MISSING! We need in preparing publication quality contents. I use custom classes for sizing tiddler in A4, A5, etc. and then the plugin river from BTC with page break between tiddlers!

Take a look at price documentation here: https://www.princexml.com/doc-prince/#page-size.

But as you said, I have to do everything manually! There is no way to see when the tiddler contents overflow the specified size!

I hope other people in this forum share their idea / experience on page sizing / break issue

I think print river can be improved to help in this case! For example it can have page break preview!

Mohammad

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Mohammad

I notice you are looking at Prince. Its a really excellent thing to study to understand CSS for print.

I think, likely, the best way to implement CSS for print in TiddlyWiki is to develop print stylesheets and share them to tease out the issues.

There are four levels I can think of ...

1 - Getting the basic Print CSS working

2 - Dealing with cross-browser issues (e.g. how they handle margin over-rides)

3 - Font handling/selection/substitution

4 - Variations on Printer or Virtual Printer (e.g. pdf) settings

Part of the issue is not TW. Its the general issue of How to harmonise 1-4. Prince, in particular, takes on this problem in a consistent way, so its useful to study.

Regarding "break previewing" --- Print-preview in-browser is often pretty good, though sometimes fails to match actual output because of one or more issues 2 to 4.

TIPS: At a simple level whilst developing a print layout it can be useful to ...

-- Force print version to print in monospaced fonts (helps understand the layout metrics)

-- Create two test tiddlers simply consisting of lines of numbers (e.g. 01234567890123 etc) and print them to better identify lateral and vertical spacing issues

-- In testing ALWAYS test in TWO different Browsers and with TWO different Printers

I found this approach useful for better understanding which of 1-4 are the problem, especially for Break-Points.

Best wishes

Josiah

 Mohammad wrote:

Take a look at price documentation here: https://www.princexml.com/doc-prince/#page-size.

 

There is no way to see when the tiddler contents overflow the specified size!

[Mohammad]

Hello Josiah,

 Many thanks for your useful comments!

I will give a try to see how I can do it!

Mohammad

[TonyM]

Josiah,

Would it be posible to publish some test print tiddlers and instructions for callabrating print output.

With the advent of 5.1.18 I plan to build some test data and test data generators and publish them so we can share some standard test data sets. Some test prints would complement this.

I will start a new thread on this.

Regards
Tony