Dear Friends,
The first blossoms of spring are upon us, and much has been happening with
Editoria in the last couple of months. I'm sure many of you are ready for a progress report, and we're happy to oblige. So, please continue to scroll ahead for updates on features, schedule, and where to find us this spring. If you like these updates and know of others who might like a copy, please feel free to
forward along.
Features
Track Changes
We spent a good part of February working through the UI design for the track changes feature in Editoria. Many of you will recall that we solicited feedback via our Google Group on several proposed designs, and I'm delighted to announce that after some productive feedback, we have settled on the UI for this. It will look something like this:
One heavily requested feature for this was the ability to leverage keyboard shortcuts to work through accepting and rejecting changes, which we definitely intend to try to address. More to come on this.
InDesign Export
In testing, we have been working with much success with the Vivliostyle formatter for automated typesetting and PDF output. However, there are going to be titles for which automated typesetting is either difficult or impossible, and for those titles, we intend to introduce support for exporting ICML (InCopy) files for InDesign import using the open source Pandoc library. This will give users the ability to leverage the powerful capabilities of Editoria for editorial production workflow management for titles that are not suited to automated typesetting.
Styles Pane
Manuscript styling is a critical part of book production, and
Editoria will make this easier than ever. The new UI (discussed below) introduces a styles pane that allows for easy access to all available styles in the left-hand column.
New UI
As I just mentioned Editoria will be getting a UI refresh from what some of you have seen in earlier iterations of the application. The old UI really mimicked a word processor. Need I say more? One of the driving ideas behind Editoria is to forge a new paradigm for managing book production in a web-based environment. We think the new look, which
Coko Foundation intends to leverage for other editors built with the
Substance editor utilizing the
PubSweet framework is a significant upgrade. Here is a sneak peak at the new UI. It still needs a little work, but it's the general direction that we're heading—note the styling pane in the left column and the note editor in the footer.
Development Schedule
The Coko development team is working feverishly on the application, and we're looking to have a preliminary version of the full application with the current features for testing in about six weeks. Our goal is to have a largely functional version of the application to show folks at SSP and AAUP later this spring.
Where to Find Us This Spring
On the subject of conferences, we will be on hand a couple of the big ones this spring, and would love to connect with any of you who are in attendance.
Society for Scholarly Publishing, May 31-June 2nd, Boston, MA—We will be doing a five minute preview session of
Editoria during the Previews Plenary at the meeting. In addition, Erich will be participating in a pre-meeting session, "Open Source Tools for Scholarly Publishing."
Association of American University Presses, June 11-13, 2017, Austin, TX— We are organizing an
Editoria interest group meeting at the meeting. Details to come. Please
contact me if you are planning to attend the meeting and would like to be a part of this. We will demo the software, answer questions, and provide some time for your feedback.
Finally
For those of you who would like to get a bit of a sneak peak at some of the things that we have been working on, Adam Hyde, co-founder of Coko Foundation, did an
overview video demo of
Editoria. Because
Editoria is still under development this is really just a sneak peak as there are many things about
Editoria that have already changed since this video was produced, but for those of you who don't see it every day, it might be a useful glimpse into what we've been working on. Thanks to Adam for posting this and also to the development team at Coko for all the continuing hard work on
Editoria.
