Conference call in January 2012
Marc Laporte
We are working on a project to develop an Online Publishing House:
http://dev.tiki.org/Online+Publishing+House
We have a conference call planned for January 2012 and we'd like to
discuss the topic of WikiPublisher.
http://dev.tiki.org/Online+Publishing+House+-+January+2012+Web+conference
Can someone from the dev team attend? We could change the date and/or
time of the meeting to be more friendly to someone from, say, New
Zealand :-)
Best regards,
--
M ;-)
Marc Laporte
http://tiki.org/
JR
but manageable.
Do I need to install anything to use Big Blue Button?
Have you looked at pressbooks.com (also in Montreal), which is doing
something similar using WordPress as the authoring environment, with
Wikipublisher producing the print books.
I am guessing that you first found out about Wikipublisher at
WikiSym2009...
JR
On Dec 22, 12:13 pm, Marc Laporte <marclapo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> We are working on a project to develop an Online Publishing House:http://dev.tiki.org/Online+Publishing+House
>
> We have a conference call planned for January 2012 and we'd like to
Hugh McGuire
:)
hugh.
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "wikipublisher" group.
> To post to this group, send email to wikipu...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikipublishe...@googlegroups.com.
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>
Marc Laporte
> Hello Marc, this sounds interesting. 7 am NZ time is a little tough,
> but manageable.
>
Awesome!
> Do I need to install anything to use Big Blue Button?
>
Just need a browser, with Flash. And highly recommended to use a
headset. Take it for a spin here: http://demo.bigbluebutton.org/ (An
awesome FOSS project by the way)
> Have you looked at pressbooks.com (also in Montreal), which is doing
Yeah, I met Hugh and he gave me a crash course :-) And I am
delighted that this project lead to enhancements in the recent
versions.
> something similar using WordPress as the authoring environment, with
> Wikipublisher producing the print books.
>
Similar indeed! A difference is that, AFAICT, our scope will end up
being broader. online collaborative books: yes. But beyond the wiki
which is mostly text centric, we have a data-centric component, called
Trackers. Basically, a custom database builder:
http://doc.tiki.org/Trackers
Example use case:
Say an association uses Tiki for membership management. They want to
print & snail mail personalized letters. Ex.: Thank you for being a
member of our XYZ association. Your membership will expire on $date.
Below is the information we have in our records. To renew your
membership, please sign the form and mail it in with your check or
with the credit card info filled in. If some information is incorrect,
please update using the blank fields below. If you want to update your
information and renew online, please visit: http://example.com Your
username is: xyz Your password is: abc
Another use case is collaboratively-produced business cases. Data from
Wiki and spreadsheet: http://doc.tiki.org/Spreadsheet+JQ
And we also need ways of having contextual content. For example,
WritingTravellers lets you produce a personalized travel book which
gathers content depending on your answers to a wizard. Take it for a
spin here: http://www.writingtravellers.com/tikiwiki/tiki-makebook.php
More info: http://www.writingtravellers.com/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=User+Generated+Guidebooks
> I am guessing that you first found out about Wikipublisher at
> WikiSym2009...
>
errrr.. (shame) I was at WikiSym 2009 and I even managed the website
(http://www.wikisym.org/ws2009/) but at that time, my focus was
nowhere near printing. Instead I was working on things like
performance, slideshow, spreadsheet, and the mobile version. It's only
recently that high-quality printing is increasingly appearing on my
radar as an important thing to address:-)
I'd like to have a little green box in the "Desktop publishing
software" column here :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_office_suites#Offline_capabilities
Best regards,
M ;-)
> JR
>
> On Dec 22, 12:13 pm, Marc Laporte <marclapo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi!
>>
>> We are working on a project to develop an Online Publishing House:http://dev.tiki.org/Online+Publishing+House
>>
>> We have a conference call planned for January 2012 and we'd like to
>> discuss the topic of WikiPublisher.http://dev.tiki.org/Online+Publishing+House+-+January+2012+Web+confer...
>>
>> Can someone from the dev team attend? We could change the date and/or
>> time of the meeting to be more friendly to someone from, say, New
>> Zealand :-)
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> --
>> M ;-)
>>
>> Marc Laportehttp://tiki.org/
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "wikipublisher" group.
> To post to this group, send email to wikipu...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikipublishe...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/wikipublisher?hl=en.
>
--
Marc Laporte
> Hello Marc, this sounds interesting. 7 am NZ time is a little tough,
> but manageable.
>
Hi John!
We moved it to 8 am NZ time to make it easier for you:
http://dev.tiki.org/Online+Publishing+House+-+January+2012+Web+conference
Best regards,
M ;-)
JR
Mail-outs. Individual letters are no problem. Mail-merge is not
currently supported, but there is a LaTeX mail-merge package which
works a treat. It should be possible to pass a wikibook xml letter
template and csv data file to wikipublisher and have it produce a pdf
containing a generated set of letters and envelopes. The trick would
be in how to write the letter template in the wiki in a way that can
be translated into a suitable LaTeX template for the mail-merge
package to work on.
Business cases. There would need to be a way to translate the
spreadsheet into something LaTeX can understand -- preferably a table,
but possibly an image. If you are going to support techniques like
Investment Logic Mapping, you will also need collaborative image
editing. Would you envisage using SVG for this? Currently,
wikipublisher doesn't support SVG, but is should be possible to use
Inkscape to convert SVG to PDF or EPS on the fly.
Contextual content. As far as wikipublisher is concerned, it simply
typesets a stream of wikibook xml and doesn't care how this was
generated, as long as it is valid wikibook xml. So if the originating
site can gather it, wikpublisher can print it.
Overall, the big question is how to teach the site to produce wikibook
xml. PressBooks is using xslt to transform html into wikibook xml. The
PmWiki plug-in tells the wiki engine how to produce wikibook,
replacing all the rules that normally turn wiki markup into html. So
to decide whether wikipublisher is a suitable engine for your
purposes, you'll need to work out the feasibility of teaching tiki to
produce wikibook xml.
JR
On 23 Dec, 21:24, Marc Laporte <marclapo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I am guessing that you first found out about Wikipublisher at
> > WikiSym2009...
>
> errrr.. (shame) I was at WikiSym 2009 and I even managed the website
> (http://www.wikisym.org/ws2009/) but at that time, my focus was
> nowhere near printing. Instead I was working on things like
> performance, slideshow, spreadsheet, and the mobile version. It's only
> recently that high-quality printing is increasingly appearing on my
> radar as an important thing to address:-)
>
> I'd like to have a little green box in the "Desktop publishing
> Best regards,
>
> M ;-)
>
>
>
>
>
> > JR
>
> > On Dec 22, 12:13 pm, Marc Laporte <marclapo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Hi!
>
> >> We are working on a project to develop an Online Publishing House:http://dev.tiki.org/Online+Publishing+House
>
> >> We have a conference call planned for January 2012 and we'd like to
> >> discuss the topic of WikiPublisher.http://dev.tiki.org/Online+Publishing+House+-+January+2012+Web+confer...
>
> >> Can someone from the dev team attend? We could change the date and/or
> >> time of the meeting to be more friendly to someone from, say, New
> >> Zealand :-)
>
> >> Best regards,
>
> >> --
> >> M ;-)
>
> >> Marc Laportehttp://tiki.org/
>
> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "wikipublisher" group.
> > To post to this group, send email to wikipu...@googlegroups.com.
> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikipublishe...@googlegroups.com.
Marc Laporte
https://dev.tiki.org/Online+Publishing+House+-+January+2012+Web+conference
More thought below...
On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 8:56 PM, JR <rank...@gmail.com> wrote:
> A couple of comments on the use cases and wikipublisher.
>
> Mail-outs. Individual letters are no problem. Mail-merge is not
> currently supported, but there is a LaTeX mail-merge package which
> works a treat. It should be possible to pass a wikibook xml letter
> template and csv data file to wikipublisher and have it produce a pdf
> containing a generated set of letters and envelopes. The trick would
> be in how to write the letter template in the wiki in a way that can
> be translated into a suitable LaTeX template for the mail-merge
> package to work on.
>
I was thinking the mail-merge would actually be done in Tiki. We need
this logic anyhow for newsletters. We would produce a wikibook XML for
each letter.
> Business cases. There would need to be a way to translate the
> spreadsheet into something LaTeX can understand -- preferably a table,
> but possibly an image. If you are going to support techniques like
> Investment Logic Mapping, you will also need collaborative image
> editing. Would you envisage using SVG for this? Currently,
> wikipublisher doesn't support SVG, but is should be possible to use
> Inkscape to convert SVG to PDF or EPS on the fly.
>
For the spreadsheet, exporting to a table would be fine.
SVG: we integrated SVG-edit (http://code.google.com/p/svg-edit/) and
we call it Tiki Draw: http://doc.tiki.org/Draw
This permits collaborative drawing (not in realtime though, but with
layers and versionning), and SVG-edit has a feature to export to .png,
which we may need to tweak to export a higher-res for print
> Contextual content. As far as wikipublisher is concerned, it simply
> typesets a stream of wikibook xml and doesn't care how this was
> generated, as long as it is valid wikibook xml. So if the originating
> site can gather it, wikpublisher can print it.
>
Understood. Is there a place to download some Wiki Book XML samples?
> Overall, the big question is how to teach the site to produce wikibook
> xml. PressBooks is using xslt to transform html into wikibook xml. The
> PmWiki plug-in tells the wiki engine how to produce wikibook,
> replacing all the rules that normally turn wiki markup into html. So
> to decide whether wikipublisher is a suitable engine for your
> purposes, you'll need to work out the feasibility of teaching tiki to
> produce wikibook xml.
>
This is indeed the biggest challenge.
"The PmWiki project [9] is a markup agnostic wiki engine (almost),
which lets a site administrator redefine or augment the markup
translation rules."
Source: http://www.wikipublisher.org/wiki/WikiSym/WikipublisherProject
That is pretty awesome. Tiki doesn't have that. Our parser for the
wiki syntax (bold, italic, etc.) is... well... it's 9 years old and it
grew organically, and could use a revamp. It's stable and most devs
avoid touching it.
However, the bit for Wiki Plugins (they are built-in and optional with
more advanced functionality, like macros
http://doc.tiki.org/Wiki+Plugin) has been revamped recently and
although there are over 130, they are quite consistent.
On the medium term, we'll want to revamp the parser. But maybe in the
short term, we can do the most common and simple ones within the
current parser.
https://dev.tiki.org/Wiki+Parser
In general, we are weak for print, and there is a lot of low-hanging
fruit. Some notes:
http://dev.tiki.org/Alternate+content+by+media
http://dev.tiki.org/Print
Best regards,
M ;-)
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/wikipublisher?hl=en.
JR
I assume the link to http://live.tiki.org/ for the conference will be
activated some time between now and then?
Right now, it says "nginx".
JR
On Jan 27, 1:11 am, Marc Laporte <marclapo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Reminder: it's in a few days:https://dev.tiki.org/Online+Publishing+House+-+January+2012+Web+confe...
>
> More thought below...
>
> On the medium term, we'll want to revamp the parser. But maybe in the
> short term, we can do the most common and simple ones within the
> In general, we are weak for print, and there is a lot of low-hanging
Marc Laporte
you can click a Big Blue Button to join the fun.
Thanks!
M ;-)
--
M ;-)
Marc Laporte
http://marclaporte.com
http://avantech.net
http://tiki.org
Marc Laporte
Here is the recording:
http://dev.tiki.org/Online+Publishing+House+-+January+2012+Web+conference#Recording
Thanks to the awesome http://www.bigbluebutton.org/ (FOSS webinars!)
Best regards,
M ;-)