Here is a proposal for a session or at least discussion…
In the 1990s there was much talk about the promise of single-source publishing: write once, output to many media (web, print etc). A decade later, can we really do that? Businesses are still wedded to the document model (Word, Excel) with all the problems of documents running around uncontrolled in the wild. Google docs is a tantalising possibility but so limited in delivery… Surely we all want to write/create once and then publish to PDF (consistent with our corporate branding) as well as web, email, Twitter feed and RSS.
I wanna build this…
Sounds like Anthologize?
Great topic. Peter Sefton at ADFI has been talking about this sort of thing for a while in the academic context. Duncan from ADFI is coming to THATCamp, so perhaps we can get him to fill us in a bit more about what’s been happening there.
It’s not quite the same thing, but I wonder if people have had a play with Anthologize yet? It’s a Wordpress plugin that takes blog content, and anything else with a RSS feed, and turns it into a book (TEI, PDF, ePUB). I have some plans for it myself and would be interested to hear if anyone else is looking at it.
Snap!
Yup. Anthologize is great. And there are others too but it’s a long way from being able to format documents into manuals and publications suitable for business. And for all it’s strength, WordPress is not really much of a document management tool… Although maybe it could be…
Anthologize is still young but we need things like a tables of contents, indices, paragraph styles, numbered lists, high-res graphics etc…
I’m more than happy to chat about this. We have our ICE software (http://ice.usq.edu.au) that is being used for everything from posting to blogs to preparing multi-format course materials.
Adam Hyde does v interesting work in this area. His FLOSS manuals are great, but i wonder if his booki project might be interesting.
http://www.booki.cc/
http://blog.booki.cc/?m=201007