Imagining librarianship & experiments with document conversion
Imagining librarianship & experiments with document conversion |
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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
---
After this, it uses a simple syntax to make headings, paragraphs, bold and italic, lists (ordered and unordered), hyperlinks, and many more elements that can easily be converted to multiple file formats. This is part of a hybrid publishing workflow, whereby
We began by catching up on our projects, recording thoughts in a pad:
From this file we made a PDF: