Adapting Hesperian Books
We are working on getting Hesperian Books in the hands of the people who need them the most.
Hesperian
Hesperian is a non-profit organization who creates prints and pdf's of basic healthcare information for the developing world. They have been gracious enough to allow us their source InDesign files for their documents for our uses. Anna B is our contact with Hesperian and is an active contributor to Health related projects.
Status
Pascal Scheffers was working on InDesign scripting to output the PDF documents into html+css for display on the XO. This has since stopped for a number of reasons:
- 30+ hours of battling with InDesign - and it doesn't do the job as advertised
Luckily the books don't need to be translated:
- The books already come in PDF format, and just need to be joined together (via pdfmerge)
- To actually convert them into html would require reading every book more than once to make sure that everything is correct.
Concerns from the community
After talking to medical professionals who work on building hospitals in developing countries, they had mentioned that it would be a very bad idea (from a security perspective) to have people download the books - they wanted to have them on the laptops when they are deployed. This would make it much more difficult to modify/tamper with the books.
Since speaking with them User:Mick has been trying to get in touch with the right people to get these books on the laptops, especially to the ones who need the information the most.
Current Issues
- Finding the right people to get the books on the laptops (within olpc). Would the content people be the right ones, or the deployments themselves. I've been told that content doesn't go on the laptop unless there is a significant push by the deployments (unverified claim). There may need to be an "awareness campaign" started - so that the deployments know about the books.
- While the book is translated into 100+ languages, it is all done outside of the Hesperian foundation. Every translation group/organization would need to be contacted separately
- The only available (that is to say reliable) translation is in Spanish.
- We would need to find doctors who can review the translations for each language (that was not translated by the Hesperian Foundation). This is a serious undertaking, though we should focus on places where the xo is being deployed.
You can help
If you happen to know the right people who can make the necessary things happen to get these very important books to areas where there are no doctors and dentists, please let User:Mick know.
