Adapting Hesperian Books: Difference between revisions
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(changed the status of the project after talking with PascalS and others.) |
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{{Health}} |
{{Health}} |
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We are working on |
We are working on getting [http://www.hesperian.org Hesperian] Books in the hands of the people who need them the most. |
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== Hesperian == |
== Hesperian == |
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== Status == |
== Status == |
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[[User:Pascal|Pascal Scheffers]] |
[[User:Pascal|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: |
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* 30+ hours of battling with InDesign - and it doesn't do the job as advertised |
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Luckily the books don't need to be translated: |
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=== Details about InDesign === |
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* The books already come in PDF format, and just need to be joined together (via pdfmerge) |
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* To actually convert them into html would require reading every book more than once to make sure that everything is correct. |
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== Concerns from the community == |
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Because of the number of books available, and the way the InDesign documents are split into chapters this work can easily be spread out over a number of people. We're starting out with 'Where there is no Doctor', but as soon as we have the basics down, we can hand out tasks for everyone. |
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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. |
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The work consists of: |
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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. |
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# Updating the InDesign documents: |
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## Fix the text export order: XHTML is output in a left-to-right, top-to-bottom order of the text frames on the InDesign page. A lot of pages have more than one text frame, and most of the time, they're not exporting in the right order. The easiest fix is to thread the text frames in the right order. You'll know you have it right if you open the story editor (ctrl-Y / cmd-Y) and see all text of the page in the right order. (exception: the chapter name and number need to be in a separate story. |
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## properly set paragraph styles: The styles are needed to hint that text blocks are actually text insets, image labels, etc. It is mostly okay, but a little fixing is needed here and there. |
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## Set the character style: '''bold''' and ''italics'' are used throughout the books. Unfortunately, a lot of them (more than half) do not have a character style assigned to them. These are needed to keep the bold/italics in XHTML. |
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## Do a cross media export XHTML/Dreamweaver and check to see if the TEXT order is correct, use the standard wtnd.css file to see if you have set all paragraph and character styles correctly. Use Firefox for this step! Ignore the image order, if you know how to get them inserted in the XHTML in the right place please tell me how! For now, images will be manually moved to the right place in the XHTML output. |
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## When you have a chapter with all the text in the right order, paragraph styles correct, '''bold''' and ''italics'' all show up, make a copy of the XHTML file and start editing the copy (make a copy, because you will likely need to run the cross media export a couple of times after you start hand editing, you would not want to accidentally delete your hand work!). Now you can start moving the images to the right locations. |
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## Convert the TIFF images to PNG files: Open them in PhotoShop/GIMP; Convert to grayscale (very important!); guess the right width for the image (Browse page width is about 770 pixels wide, taking margins into account; Most images will be in the 270-350 pixel range. You don't need to be too precise. Just guess with 770 pixels as 100% page width). If there are labels on the images in the book, please add those to the images and add the language identifier to the name. At this stage it really helps to check on your XO every now and again. |
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## Redo from 1 for the next chapter. |
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== Current Issues == |
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Transforming layered images to something which exports better: A whole bunch of pictures in the books are actually a couple of images layered on top of each other in InDesign. Recreate these with a little work in Photoshop and export as grayscale PNG. |
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* 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. |
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'''Obtaining the InDesign Documents''' |
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* 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 |
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* The only available (that is to say reliable) translation is in Spanish. |
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* 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. |
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== You can help == |
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We don't want to publish the InDesign documents on the web, if you want to help, please email [[User:Pascal]] and ask for a copy. Two reasons for this: version control and version control. The first being Hesperian.org, who don't want stray copies on the net. The second being us, where knowing who has a copy will allow me to notify people working on this project to update their copies. Adobe has a very nice version management tool, which we cannot use... |
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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. |
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== How you can contribute == |
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=== Anyone can contribute === |
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* Find some color images to aid diagnosis: We are no longer constrained to the black and white line drawings. Please see [[Health Images]] |
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=== Contact [[User:Pascal|Pascal Scheffers]] if you can help with the following technical/css issues === |
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# Creating a common style sheet (CSS) for basic layout |
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# Creating the per-chapter stylesheet with placement hints specific for elements in that chapter |
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# Creating hyperlinks in the books for ease of use |
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# Creating OnMouseOver glossary lookups |
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=== People/Skills Needed: please contact [[User:Pascal|Pascal Scheffers]] === |
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* InDesign (CS2/3) experience (or people willing to burn at least 20 odd hours learning InDesign) |
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* [[Health Images | Illustration]] skills. |
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* A CSS Guru |
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'''Stage 1: creating a basic style-sheet''' |
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Maja and Pascal are working on this during the Xmas break. We're using chapter 1 of WTND (english) and creating the HTML version to look mostly like the printed book. Looks very doable. |
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[[Category:Health]][[Category:Content]][[Category:Open projects]] |
[[Category:Health]][[Category:Content]][[Category:Open projects]] |
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Revision as of 08:13, 10 February 2009
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.