Adapting Hesperian Books

We are working on creating adaptations of Hesperian Books.

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.

The work consists of:

1. Updating the InDesign documents:
   1. 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.
   2. 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.
   3. 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.
   4. 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.
   5. 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.
   6. 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.
   7. Redo from 1 for the next chapter.

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. The simplest method is probably to turn them into illustrator images, and place those in the InDesign documents. The downside is that text will be rendered in the image. Better ideas welcome (css layers?).

1. Creating a common style sheet (CSS) for basic layout
2. Creating the per-chapter stylesheet with placement hints specific for elements in that chapter
3. Creating hyperlinks in the books for ease of use
4. Creating OnMouseOver glossary lookups
5. Find some color images to aid diagnosis: We are no longer constrained to the black and white line drawings.

Items 1, 2 and 3 are minimal requirements for a text readable in Browse.

4 and later nice to haves.

People/Skills Needed

• InDesign (CS2/3) experience (or people willing to burn at least 20 odd hours learning InDesign)
• Illustrator skills
• A CSS Guru

Obtaining the InDesign Documents

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...

Stage 1: creating a basic style-sheet

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.