Editoria meetings at UCP

~ adamjhyde ~ Leave a comment

These last 2 weeks Coko developers Yannis Barlas and Christos Kokosias have been working alongside Kate Warne and Cindy Fulton from UCP.

Yannis and Christos came to San Francisco (from Athens) for 3 weeks specifically to work with Kate and Cindy on some new features. Out of these meetings we now have some exciting new features that we will write more about on this blog soon!

While in San Francisco Christos and Yannis also met with the wider UCP staff to demonstrate Editoria and discuss the future of the application.

There was a lot of excitement about the application and a fantastic discussion about possible future features.

Editoria Update

~ adamjhyde ~ Leave a comment

Recent changes to Editoria.

Added

  • Clicking on a source note’s number in the notes editor snaps the main content editor to the source note’s callout #37

Changed

  • Updated track changes buttons for consistent capitalization (“Record Changes” is now “Record changes” and “Recording Changes” is now “Recording changes”) #62
  • Numbers in the note callout icon moved higher up to be more legible and look more natural #15
  • Application title changed from “Pubsweet app” to “Editoria” #24
  • Focus moves back to main editor with active cursor after clicking any of the track changes buttons (“Record/Recording changes” and “Show/Hide changes”) #60
  • Source Note style changed from inline style to a block-level style. Removed icon from top formatting tool bar, and added Source Note to the styling pane in two places #49
  • Switched the placement of the “Edit/View” and “Rename” buttons for components in the Book Builder interface to reflect the relative frequency of these actions #30
  • In the Book Builder interface, double clicking a component name now opens it in the editor, rather than opening a text field to rename the component #31
  • Changed capitalization of “Back To book” button to “Back to book” #32
  • When authors or copyeditors are about to change a workflow state in a way that will revoke their “edit” access, they see a warning message. The text of this warning message has been updated for clarity, to: “You won’t be able to edit this chapter after updating this workflow status. Are you sure you wish to continue?” #34
  • Some styles have been renamed (lists, subtitles, dialogue), and the order and groupings of styles have been updated #48
  • The currently applied style is more easily visible in the style panel across different displays (the applied style name changes more dramatically than before) #50
  • Upon exiting the editor with unsaved changes, the option on the warning screen to “Cancel” and go back to the editor has changed to “Take me back to the editor” for clarity #9
  • Users with author or copyeditor role no longer see non-functional buttons to “Rename” or “Delete” books from the book dashboard #26

Removed

  • Bold package removed from the note editor #17

Fixed

  • Resolving a comment no longer breaks the appearance of some of the styles in the editor (Subtitle, Extract: Poetry, Extract: Prose, Epigraph: Poetry, or Epigraph: Prose), #61
  • Font ligatures have been disabled in the editor, fixing the issue of certain character sequences combining into one character and causing the cursor to skip (e.g. “ff” and “fl”) #18
  • Book components can be dragged and dropped to rearrange after exiting the Wax editor (Substance drag-and-drop now properly disconnects) #19
  • Resolved font warning upon loading the editor #27
  • When exiting the editor, the bug where the user had to click “Save and quit” or “Quit without saving” multiple times has been resolved #20

Towards Editoria 1.0

~ adamjhyde ~ 2 Comments

We are approaching Editoria 1.0. Here is a quick insight into how it all fits together.

First of all there are basically 3 modules (so far) that comprise the system – the Dashboard, the Book Builder, and the Editor.

The Dashboard

The Editoria Dashboard displays the books that you are working on.

d

On the Dashboard you can do the following operations:

  1. Add a book
  2. Rename a book
  3. Edit a book
  4. Delete a book

The following short video demonstrates these actions (I recommend clicking on the icon at the bottom right to view the video fullscreen).

Book Builder

The Book Builder module is so named because this is how you ‘build a book’. When you first create a book from the Dashboard and click ‘edit’ you will see the default display of the new book.

b

You will notice there are empty Divisions – Front Matter, Body, and Back Matter. To these you can add new Components. Components can be either Parts or Chapters (note, we follow naming conventions from the Chicago Manual of Style where possible).

Front Matter and Back Matter components can be called anything you wish or you may select from a default list comprising of items such as Table of Contents, Preface, Introduction (Front Matter) or Appendix A, Glossary etc (Back Matter).

The Body components are not selected from a default list since these are the titles of the Chapters and Parts of the book you are working on

Using the Book Builder you can build up the structure of the book as shown in this short demonstration video.

The Book Builder also enables you to:

  1. Set the status for any component (this also effects access permissions)
  2. Set the pagination-break rule per component (left/right breaking page)
  3. Delete a component
  4. Rename a component
  5. Edit a component

We’ll cover these in a later post. One additional feature that is important to cover however is the uploading of Microsoft Word files into the system. Editoria supports uploading a docx file into a component. The content is converted automatically into HTML and loaded into the system.

The Editor

We have built a very special editor for Editoria. This is designed by the University of California Press staff to reflect how production staff ‘think’ about content, and supports scholarly publishing workflows for preparing a text for publishing.

ed

This editor is very sophisticated and can be customized to meet the needs of different publishers. Currently the features include:

  1. Adding / removing inline styles (Italics, superscript etc)
  2. Source notes
  3. Track Changes
  4. Annotations (commenting), including replying, resolving etc
  5. Notes management (with track changes and commenting)
  6. Independently scrolling notes panel
  7. Block Styling (headings, lists, prose/poetry styles etc)
  8. Image placement
  9. Undo/redo
  10. Linking

The following brief demonstration video illustrates some of these features in action.

Collaboration Support

Editoria supports collaboration. The model we have chosen to support for this upcoming release is a component lock paradigm. This means no two people can edit the same component at the same time. Hence, if one person is editing the Introduction, then they have the lock on that content until they are end their editing session.

To support this type of collaboration we have synchronized component locks and other items on the Book Builder. You can see this in action in the following demonstration video (changes on left mirrored on right).

Additional Features

In addition to the above there are other major features which we will demonstrate another time, including:

  1. Team management (role based)
  2. Access permissions
  3. Export to EPUB

Where to Get Editoria

Editoria is 100% free. It is open source (MIT license). Editoria is a web-based platform which means you need to install it on a server and access it through your browser. If you know someone that can do this then the can find the latest source code here:

https://gitlab.coko.foundation/editoria/editoria

If you wish to join the Editoria community subscribe to the newsletter. Mailing lists, community events and much more coming soon! Look for us also at SSP and AAUP 2017.

Editoria at SSP and AAUP

~ Erich van Rijn ~ 2 Comments

The spring/summer conference season is about to kick into high gear, and we’re here to help you plan your travel. We’ll be busy at both the Society for Scholarly Publishing and Association of American University Presses conferences in May and June, and we’d love to connect with you to talk about Editoria.

Society for Scholarly Publishing, Boston, MA, May 31st-June 2nd

Erich van Rijn will be participating in several session at this year’s SSP meeting in Boston between May 31st and June 2nd, and is also available for individual appointments to talk about Editoria. Come find us at the following sessions:

Open Source Tools for Scholarly Publishing — This is a pre-meeting session, organized by Kristen Ratan of the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation, during which we’ll be talking about incorporating open source tools into scholarly publishing.  We’ll explore how to build them and enhance adoption, and how tools like Editoria can improve scholarly publishing workflows.

Open for Discovery? Open Access Monographs in Scholarly Research Workflows — Erich van Rijn will be moderating a panel on discoverability of open access monographs.  The panel will include presentations from Jennifer Kemp of Crossref, Frank Smith of JSTOR, and Wendy Queen of ProjectMUSE.

Preview Session: New and Noteworth Product Presentations — We’ll be doing a five-minute pitch on Editoria alongside a number of other cool new tools during this session.  Please come check this session out. From what I’ve seen, there should be a number of great presentations in addition to our own.

If you’d like to set up a time to talk outside of these sessions, please get in touch.

Association of American University Presses, Austin, TX, June 12th-13th

Interest Group Meeting — I’m organizing a breakfast session at this year’s AAUP, which will happen on June 12th.  Please use this form to get in touch or tweet me (@erichvanrijn) if you’re interested in attending.  I’ll be giving a brief overview of the software, answering your questions, and discussing how we can create a community of Editoria adopters, developers, and partners.

Individual Meetings — If you’d like to schedule an individual meeting to discuss Editoria, please use the following form to request a meeting, and we’ll be in touch.  I’d be more than happy to get together with anyone who’s interested in a deeper dive.

We look forward to seeing you this spring!

 

 

Editoria Update — January 2017

~ Erich van Rijn ~ Leave a comment
This month’s Editoria update helps us usher in 2017 a bit belatedly. January has passed us by quickly, but there have been no shortage of Editoria developments that we are eager to share with you all, so please read on.

 

To begin with, we are embarking on a new era in our outreach efforts for Editoria.  For the last twelve months, we have been largely directing our communications and progress reports to a small, dedicated group of advisers to the project.  This group has been tremendously valuable to us in our early efforts to build the system.  But starting with this newsletter, we will be delivering more regular missives to a larger group of contacts we have cultivated during our work on Editoria who have asked to be kept better apprised of its development.  If you’re new to these updates and would like some further background, you might want to head over to our blog at editoria.pub and check out last month’s update.  There is some other good information about the project, and we are trying to keep it up to date.

 

So, where are we?

 

As I mentioned, January has been a big month for Editoria.  To begin with, our friend, Adam Hyde, the co-founder of Coko Foundation and one of the chief facilitators of the development of Editoria, has actually just used the system to produce the first short book that has ever been run through the system.  The book is called, The Cabbage Tree Method, and it outlines his methodology for open source collaborative product development.  As Adam writes on his blog, “The book was written and rendered in entirely open source tools including Editoria and Vivliostyle.  HTML all the way home….”  An impressive achievement.  You can download a copy here (PDF) or here (EPUB).  I’m reading it right now, and it’s not just a good example of HTML typesetting, it’s a great read.

 

In other news, Coko’s development team has been hard at work implementing a very important feature of the system—the ability to track changes to text in Editoria‘s WYSIWYG editor.  This is critical functionality because it allows editors and authors to work in the system and better understand how they are interacting with the text and with each other in the collaborative effort to produce the book.  We will be turning our project editors and freelance copyeditors loose on this soon, but here is an early look at the current implementation, version 0.1, of this feature:screen-shot-2017-01-26-at-9-07-29-pm

 

February and March will see more important updates to the system, and we will also begin doing some of the heavy-lifting involved in user testing of the application during the coming months, but this is all great progress.  Again, see last month’s update if you would like a rundown of other features that we’ve been building in the system.

 

We will keep you further informed of our progress going forward.  Please feel free to share this update with any other folks who might be interested in Editoria.  Also, if you have questions, want to talk over our approach, would like more information about the application, or just express your enthusiasm for HTML-based book production workflows, we are always glad to hear from you, and we can be reached at either evanrijn@ucpress.edu or catherine.mitchell@ucop.edu.

Happy New Year from Editoria

~ Erich van Rijn ~ Leave a comment
This is a slightly edited version of an update on the Editoria project that was sent to our advisory board in December.  Going forward, we will be posting our monthly notes here on the blog, and delivering them to a broader group of contacs that we have cultivated in our conversations and travels over the course of the last couple of years working on the project.  If you are not currently on our email list and would like to receive regular updates, I encourage you to fill out our contact form.
The Editoria project is indeed moving into an exciting phase of its development, and I wanted to share some of our recent accomplishments and what lies ahead for us in 2017.
What We’ve Accomplished
Adam Hyde at the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation has an excellent post on his blog that summarizes a lot of the work that’s been done on the overall architecture of the system, and also specific features that have been built into the system.  I encourage you to read Adam’s post, which I think summarizes the current state of the application quite nicely.  However, I will briefly recap some of the important work that’s been done:
  1. Built team manager functionality that will allow the various members of a team involved in the production of a book (e.g. project editor, copyeditor, author) to interact with the text based upon permission assigned to them.
  2. Designed and implemented a commenting and querying system in the editor that allows for participants in a project to interactively comment on the text.
  3. Built out the libraries, known as XSweet, that are required for converting Word files to HTML for editing and display in the Editoria system.
  4. Developed and implemented a chapter structure navigation in the right column of the editor that allows a participant to easily navigate to any component of a chapter.
  5. Output print-ready PDFs from HTML using the Vivliostyle HTML/CSS typesetting engine.
What’s Up Next
Between now and mid to late April, which is when our current project plan has us beginning to pilot books through Editoria, we will be working on several critical pieces of functionality necessary to successfully use the the system in production.  These include:
  1. Adding track changes functionality.
  2. Integrating the system with the INK file conversion service that allows for automated upload and conversion of Word files.
  3. Adding an index builder.
  4. Building of the image management functionality necessary for image placement.
  5. Automating the output of PDF and EPUB files.
In addition, we will be doing some extensive unit testing of the various components of the system. This phase is currently planned for February/March.  We will be scheduling some webinar overviews of the system in the next couple of months—watch out for announcements.