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. differentiate styles: The styles are needed to hint that text blocks are actually text insets, image labels, etc. Right now, just two or three are used for all text in the book.
   2. Adding text flow/reading order hints: The XHMTL export mechanism guesses the correct order most of the time, but it needs help here and there.
   3. 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?).
2. Creating a common style sheet (CSS) for basic layout
3. Creating the per-chapter stylesheet with placement hints specific for elements in that chapter
4. Creating hyperlinks in the books for ease of use
5. Creating OnMouseOver glossary lookups
6. 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.