This is a design foundation for a simple, yet powerful publishing paradigm for highly interactive digital books & longform reading. Find out more about why we created this. Hopefully you'll be amped up to help us create a world with better, more beautiful digital reading experiences. We want to create digital literature to fall in love with.
Currently the files in this repository consist of a template stack to turn vanilla HTML into beautiful longform reading through
- classless CSS
- a barebones HTML5 scaffolding
- some JavaScript plugins
which we use with Pelican and/or Pandoc and some Shell scripts to automate the conversion of Markdown files, image files & multimedia files into a ready-to-use folder package for browser based reading. We plan to contribute to Pelican with proper themeing soonish. We have even greater plans to provide some publishing SaaS-solutions with a server of our own. In the mean time, feel free to cook your own.
The browser stack template and the modular architecture help focus on crafting beautiful content. Radical separation of content, form & user interface means that the base line for the content to look good is way up there. Freeing craftsmen & women to write pure, unadulterated HTML5 interactivity you can drop into the template.
The way we created the template allows for some clever (we'd like to think) solution of syncing content between devices through the use of meta-data and emails. Again, this goes back to the big picture plans, but it's functional enough to allow you to create your own paragraph-based commenting without a server.
and then there is
- a reading UI to give book-like affordances to long-form reading.
The UI, much like the interactive widgets we like to drop into our digital books, is created with Hype. This is not an open source tool, but it is software with a very low barrier to entry and a tremendous return in productivity. We give you our original UI-template to play with and adapt.
Over time the plan is to eliminate the need for hard-coding references from the UI altogether. We also want to give you a TOC with supercharged functionality that is not quite ready for action.