Paged.js workshops pretty popular!

Paged.js is the open source pagination engine we are developing to support CSS paged media specifications. The development has progressed pretty fast, since starting in February this year. So far, we know of one commercial product and several really interesting open source projects that have integrated it. Paged.js has also been used to make its first print book (the Editoria manual made in a Book Sprint last month). We don’t consider it near a 1.0 yet, so this is pretty impressive!

We are now moving into planning workshops to train people in how to use paged.js to make books (and other things) in the browser, and to extend paged.js with JavaScript to do new cool things.

We had one workshop in San Francisco last month. It was more of a paged.js core team meet really as it was a day after the Editoria community meeting and we didn’t much advertise it.

At the end of this month, there is a workshop (2 days) in Paris and one in Brussels (1 day). We have 46 people enlisted. It is close to our max. There might be a few seats left (it is a free workshop), so if you want to go, sign up here –https://www.pagedmedia.org/pagedmedia-prepostprint-workshop/

Demand seems pretty high as we have had several people that can’t make either date asking us to keep their names for the next workshop. We also have folks coming from the Netherlands and the US to attend. Pretty cool!

But stay tuned… we will have more workshops including NYC sometime in March and a few surprise other countries on the list… I’ll keep you posted!

XSweet 1.0!

We have 1.0 of the docx -> HTML transformation tool XSweet out today! It also has a new site:

http://xsweet.coko.foundation/

XSweet is a finely crafted tool. It takes docx files, those horrible mangy MS Word files, and translates them into clean, lovely, HTML. XSweet is open source, modular, and very nicely done.

A huge tip of the hat to Wendell Piez (XML guru), and to Alex Theg. As geeky as it sounds, I loved watching these two chat about the issues they encountered making this software. The attention to detail was really unbelievable. Amazing work. XSweet is a finely crafted tool.

More info on Coko https://coko.foundation/announcing-xsweet-1-0/

If you want to do a deep dive into why I think this is important, I wrote this some time ago – https://www.adamhyde.net/typescript-redistributing-labor/

PagedMedia Page Floats

Some time ago I employed Julie Blanc from my Shuttleworth Fellowship to work for the PagedMedia project. Julie has been doing amazing work and just today released this incredible article about Page Floats:

Paged Media approaches : page floats

With a running demo app: http://demos.pagedmedia.org/page-floats/

Really amazing stuff. Please share it widely!

(Julies demo code is here – https://gitlab.pagedmedia.org/JulieBlanc/demo-page-floats)

Two new PagedMedia Posts

One from Nellie McKesson on her awesome new project Hederis.

https://www.pagedmedia.org/introducing-hederis-and-why-we-care-so-much-about-pagination/

And another from Erich van Rijn about Editoria and pagination.

https://www.pagedmedia.org/editoria-building-a-book-in-a-browser/