Imagining librarianship & experiments with document conversion

Imagining librarianship & experiments with document conversion
Location: At Varia (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam), and online
Date: November 24th, 2021
Time: 16:00-19:00 CET
Pad: https://pad.simonbrowne.biz/p/pls-meeting-4
Tools: {{{tools detail}}}
Guests: {{{guests detail}}}

Context

PDF (Portable Document Format) is a highly popular digital file format for ebooks. In this workshop, we created, queried and embedded metadata in a PDF by using tools such as Pandoc, ExifTool and of course Calibre, "the swiss army knife of document conversion".

Activities

After some catching up on the contexts of our projects, we discussed the plan for today:

• a tour of Calibre
• hybrid publishing workflows
• embedding metadata in PDFs
• making digital files (EPUB, PDF with pandoc)
• converting between file formats in Calibre

Our workshop was documented on a pad using Markdown to create structure. Markdown is a lightweight markup language that can be useful in hybrid publishing, where inputs (plain text) may have may outputs (file formats). From the one document it is possible to create a variety of files, including EPUB, PDF, HTML and even Wikitext, the syntax MediaWiki uses.

Markdown uses YAML metadata headers, which require a title in the initial metatdata block:

---
title: my new document
---

[[File:

from which we made a PDF:

File:Workshop 04.md.pdf