This is a design foundation for a simple, yet powerful publishing paradigm for highly interactive digital books & longform reading. Find out more about why we created this. Hopefully you'll be amped up to help us create a world with better, more beautiful digital reading experiences. We want to create digital literature to fall in love with.
While using the framework for actual production we've encountered some insights to rethink our philosophy for the build process and the desired output. Lots of more stuff to be put into preprocessing, and (even more so than now) highly opinionated single-file-output builds to facilitate offline use and bandwidth conservation.
The next version should give you a much easier time to do themeing and perhaps help with development. With scss, too.
Currently the files in this repository consist of a template stack to turn vanilla HTML into beautiful longform reading through
- classless CSS
- a barebones HTML5 scaffolding
- some JavaScript plugins
which we use with some pre-processing scripts, Markdown (not quite vanilla) Pandoc and some Shell scripts to automate the conversion of image files & multimedia files into a ready-to-use folder package for browser based reading. Or just plain hand-made cut & paste jobs, while we work on automation.
We have even greater plans to provide some publishing SaaS-solutions with a server of our own. In the mean time, feel free to cook your own.
The browser stack template and the modular architecture help focus on crafting beautiful content. Radical separation of content, form & user interface means that the base line for the content to look good is way up there. Freeing craftsmen & women to write pure, unadulterated HTML5 interactivity you can drop into the template. Or create widgets with Hype and drop them in the HTML, letting our helper.js provide the necessary wraps and styles to make your design responsive.
The way we created the template allows for some clever (we'd like to think) solution of syncing content between devices through the use of meta-data and emails. Again, this goes back to the big picture plans, but it's functional enough to allow you to create your own paragraph-based commenting without a server.
and then there is
- a reading UI to give book-like affordances to long-form reading.
Now fresh without proprietary dependencies. Fully pluginized (is that a word?) you can add components to your project as necessary Over time the plan is to pack ever more automatic processing power into the UI. We also want to give you a smart TOC with supercharged functionality that is not quite ready for action.
Documentation is still pretty much work in progress, though. Bear with us and peruse the extensively commented code, if you will.