Estimated reading time for this article:
35
minutes.
Host Karen Lauritsen of the Open Education Network is joined by Christina Tromp, Coko Foundation project manager, to review and discuss the Open Textbook Planner and Ketida publishing tools.
Watch the video recording of this session or keep reading for a full transcript. For those interested in reading the conversation that took place among participants and the resources shared, the chat transcript is also available below.
Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please contact Tonia.
Speakers:
Karen: Hello, and welcome everybody. My name's Karen Lauritsen, I'm with the Open Education Network. And today we're joined by Christina Tromp from the Coko Foundation who will demo the new Open Textbook Planner and Ketida, an open source publishing platform. We're delighted that you could join us today. We know you are all very busy, and I just want to take this opportunity to thank you for all of the work you do to make education more equitable, accessible, and affordable through open education. So I have about five minutes of preamble here just to set the context and then I'll hand things over to Christina. So as many of you know, since you are involved in publishing open textbooks and involved in the open education community, we are committed to supporting multiple pathways to writing and publishing open textbooks because we are made up of a broad community of users and institutions.
And together we know there are many, many ways to publish a book and we work to offer options for the many different contexts in which publishing happens. For example, we work with Pressbooks, Scribe and Manifold, each of which support the open education community in their own way. And really at the end of the day, our goal is to support you, the human beings who support open textbook authors and manage publishing programs at your library and institution. And just taking that a little bit further, very broadly, our vision is to support anyone who wants to publish an open textbook, including those authors who are at institutions with fewer resources. And we really started to explore how the OEN can provide access to publishing infrastructure in the last couple of years for those, for example, who may not be able to provide their own instance of a platform. And one of the ways we've been exploring this is with the Manifold pilot, for example. And please look for an update about the Manifold pilot coming in the next couple months.
We think that Ketida and the Open Textbook Planner are exciting additions to the existing publishing pathways. It's really easy to equate publishing with a tool or platform, but everyone here knows that publishing is a really human process. And by human, I mean it can be emotional, it can be messy, and even the best tool in the world won't make writing a book a quick, easy, simple thing for most people. And that reality is really a key reason why our community is so important and time and again, it's really exciting and encouraging to see how all of you support one another in a variety of ways because it's so critical to the work that we're all doing regardless of the cool tools that are out there. So with that said, these are really cool tools. Ketida makes beautiful books. And for any of you who were at the Library Publishing Forum session last week, you'll have to sit through this little part again, but I just want to just say a word on behalf of beauty.
And while beauty's in the eye of the beholder, I think most of us would agree a beautiful book is really a pleasure to read. It presents the story and information in a consistent and engaging way that guides the reader on a journey. And maybe that journey is through time or science or space or history. Whatever the subject, most authors are interested in structuring that journey for their reader the best they can, and that's especially true for textbooks. Being beautiful means being well-designed and being well-designed means working well for the purpose at hand. So beauty in my opinion, is not really a bonus. We all deserve beauty, including students who are using open educational resources and the faculty and instructors and students who spend their time making those resources. So with that said, a little background about this project. We started working with the Coko Foundation in 2019 with an IMLS grant and an advisory group of eight OEN members who were committed to developing support for authors who want to create a consistent structured textbook. Thanks to everyone who is involved for their contributions.
The idea that we went into was really to create a tool to support authors in structuring their books before they start writing. We wanted to help them select the pedagogical elements which are so unique to textbooks so that they could present their information in a consistent way. We also talked a lot about helping authors focus on creating content and being able to really use their subject expertise while removing some of the pressures of formatting and designing a book. So in other words, we wanted to separate the content from the design so that authors could focus on writing and then still come out with a consistent textbook through styles rather than say more manual formatting. And this also means that something is more accessible. After an author plans and match their books in the Open Textbook Planner, they are moved into Ketida, which allows people to work collaboratively on creating a book in most of the ways you would expect. After that, the author can select one of several textbook templates created for the OEN and then use those templates to create EPUBs and PDFs.
And Coko is also developing a relationship with Lulu for print on demand, which I know has been sort of an ongoing challenge for many who want to provide print copies. If after today you are intrigued and want to get your hands on these tools and start playing with them, I hope you will join us in our pilot. I'll drop the documentation into the chat as soon as I'm finished with my preamble. But really, essentially the idea is to get a group using tools, see how they work for your open ed publishing programs, make some new textbooks and continue to provide feedback so that we can inspire future iterations of the Open Textbook Planner and Ketida because although the IMLS grant has ended, both of our organizations, both the OEN and Coko, are really looking forward to continuing to learn from the OER publishing community and improve the tools. Finally, I'll just say it's been really great working with Christina, also with Adam Hyde, Dione Mentis and others at Coko for many reasons, including they're also quite committed to community and community development.
And so I'm going to hand things over to Christina. She's going to show you the specifics of what I've been talking about so far. As I mentioned before, we started formally recording this session. Please, as you come up with your questions, drop them in the chat, use the Q&A. I will keep my eye on both, and we'll pause periodically to address whatever comes up. Christina Tromp is a project manager with the Coko Foundation. She's going to demonstrate the Open Textbook Planner and Ketida. Christina, we're so excited you're here, and over to you.
Christina: Thanks, Karen. Okay, if anyone can't see my screen, please let me know. But here I am inside Ketida on the dashboard. I've just got one book here for the moment. I've already created a sample book, so we have a bunch of content to demo with today. But since we do want to really focus on how you can plan your book and structure it right from the start, I'm going to add a new book and show you how you can plan in Ketida. So Ketida is an open source tool. This instance is being hosted through the OEN. They've arranged that hosting, and in this instance we have an Open Textbook Planner enabled that allows you to start a new book. So I'm going to work on a statistics book today for business statistics. I'm referencing a sample OpenStax book that you can find on openstax.org. And once I've created my book title, which global production editors will do this, we do have a number of roles in Ketida, and I'll get a bit deeper into that later.
But once a book has been created, a global production editor would typically assign a production editor who would be the project manager of the book. So if there's any questions at this stage, let me know, otherwise, I'll show how to assign members right from the start. So the book has been created and now a production editor could be added who would be responsible for completing the book plan. Once you have created the book, you can jump into plan your book, and here we've split the Open Textbook Planner into four stages. The first being to determine your book structure, then to outline the content, add pedagogical elements, and then a textbook review before you actually jump into authoring. So this really helps to create a consistent reading experience. When we first jump in, we'll choose our hierarchy for our structure. Either you would choose typically chapters with sections in them or parts with chapters and sections within each part. So for the purposes of demoing more rather than less, I'll do parts, chapters, and sections today. And then I'll jump to the next step, which is to outline the content. You can go back in steps as well.
So in the outline content step, you can add as many levels as you'd like to build a content outline. If you're not sure of your outline yet, you can jump ahead and always add more parts, chapters, and sections in the editor or the book builder at a later stage. But if you have a rough idea of what you want at this stage, it is really helpful to start building out your textbook outline for the things you already know you want. One really helpful thing here is that you can clone things. So for example, if I know that in every chapter I want at least three sections, I can just use the clone tool to add those sections in. And perhaps I know that in each part I want at least two chapters, so I could use the clone tool again to create two chapters in this part, and I could clone again this whole part, which will take over the two chapters with three sections in them. So here we go. I've cloned my second part. What's also possible is to drag and drop parts, chapters and sections if you have not such a repetitive or consistent outline.
For example, if in the first chapter, you have four sections instead of three, you can just drop an extra section in there. So I'm not going to make a very long book today, but I think we have a good outline to start demoing with. And the next thing I can do here is to add in some titles if I know what they are already. Maybe you don't know what your titles are, and that's fine, you can add them at the editing step. But if you do know what they are, you could put them in here. So I'm going to jump to one of my PDFs and jump to the table of contents. I'll get back to these PDFs a bit later, but my table of contents will give me what I need to start filling out my part and chapter title. So I'm going to put in my first part. I think I'm going to just leave it at that. And then my chapter, I think I'm going to make sampling and data. And then I'm just going to grab my H2s or my sections for my first chapter and put these in here.
So it's entirely possible to do this kind of conceptualization of what you want your book to include on paper or on email with your colleague who you're collaborating with or in your preferred environment, but the Open Book Planner in Ketida does allow you to use this as your primary planning and authoring environment. I have a pretty good idea of what I want in my first chapter and the sections for that. I'm not sure about the second chapter yet, or the second part in those chapters, so I can easily leave those blank. And either I could put placeholders and just call it chapter two for now and edit that later, or I can just leave it open and Ketida will allow us an empty untitled block with a placeholder that we can edit later. Before I move on to the next step, pedagogical elements, is there anything anyone wants to ask here? Cool. Okay. We can always get to questions about any of these steps later as well. It's of course also possible here to delete things if you've made a mistake or to edit things here.
So I'll jump to the next step, which is to add pedagogical elements. We have our hierarchy, we have our outline, and now we're choosing pedagogical elements that should apply consistently through the textbook. We split them into openers, which typically prepare the learner for content and what they will learn and closers, which typically reinforce the content that's already been learned. And we have some that could be used as openers or closers or anywhere in the text for that matter. So I think this is really the key of the planner here, the core activity that's really so important and so useful, is that it allows you to add these pedagogical elements consistently to parts, chapters, and sections so that the learner has a consistent reading experience. It's an interesting reading experience that they're engaged with because it's not just long forms of text and things are broken up into ways that make sense. So here we can drag and drop pedagogical elements from the right into the left wherever we want them.
So for example, if I want to content opener image at the start of each part, I think I'd also want one at the start of each chapter to have some visual elements kicking things off. And then I could have an introduction at the start of each chapter followed by a chapter outline. And perhaps I want some focus questions as well, perhaps before the introduction. Then perhaps in each section or at the end of each chapter, I want a review activity. I also want a bibliography at the end of each chapter. Let me drag that properly. And we could also put a summary, for example, at the end of every chapter before they dive into the review activity. And really it's possible to add any number of these pedagogical elements to each part, chapter and section. If you do want to add more of these in later at the editor step, you can do that. If you've added these inconsistently here and then you find at the editor step that in one section, you just don't want... Let's say for example, I added a key terms list to the start of every section. In one section, you just don't want a key terms list, it's not appropriate. So you could remove that at the editor stage. So each of these things will appear consistently in every part, chapter and section, and the next step will be to review the textbook. Unless there's any questions at the stage.
Karen: We do actually have a couple questions, Christina.
Christina: Great.
Karen: So earlier in your demo, I think when you were putting in the subsections and you were copying from the OpenStax book, you had some numbering. And so Jonathan asked if numbering is by hand, as in the section titles you cut and pasted.
Christina: Yeah. So if I jump to the next step, we'll see that numbering here. So I think you're referring to my H2 numbering for the section. So in this case, sections are not numbered, which allows you to do things like A, B and C or have sections without numbering, if you like. Once we get into the book builder, I'll demonstrate how chapters can be created as chapters or unnumbered components. So sometimes you want a chapter that isn't numbered, but chapters in general are numbered. You may have chapters you don't want numbered so you can mark those as unnumbered components. And a lot of this also comes into play with the templates that I'll demonstrate later. So templates, it's possible to add different templates for different numbering styles that people want. So some of the templates have, for example, numbered chapters, and the ones that I have today have auto numbered chapters, but we've left sections without default numbering. That gives more flexibility to the user.
Karen: Thank you. And just to follow up, he also asked if the menu of pedagogical elements is fixed and what if there's an element I want to use but isn't listed? And Jonathan, it is currently fixed. This is the menu of elements that we came up with in the advisory group, and part of the flexibility that Christina's been talking about I think will also allow you to use an element perhaps not totally exactly as it may be described in the list there. I think you'll find that there's some flexibility, but we really worked pretty hard to try and get as many representative elements as we could. Christina, is there anything you would add to that?
Christina: Sure, yeah. So as Karen mentioned, you could use a review activity or a self-reflection activity as a worked example, for example. So that might not be semantically completely accurate, but it will give you styling that depending on what design you're after, should work for the content that you're presenting. And also, there are some ways in Ketida to add custom inline styles or custom block styles, but that just requires us to add some more styling for that. Once you have a custom block or a custom inline format that it's fine to have that shown in the editor, but then how does that get transformed when you export a PDF or an EPUB? So those styles just need to be put in place. And I'm sure this kind of feedback is four things that people feel might be missing is really valuable in the pilot and will be very interested to see what the most popular requests are.
Karen: Absolutely. Related to that, Kristen asked where you put in question and answers, Kristen, are you thinking interactively or just kind of a Q&A? While Kristen considers that, we have one more question that Amy asked about copying and pasting outline elements and if there will be a tool to import if a book is starting from a known outline. For example, the outline is in a different format like a Google Doc or a book is based on a previously published OER. Amy, in short, Ketida does enable such things, but for the pilot, we really want to learn about how this particular book planner process works. And so there won't be an import feature for the pilot because we want everyone to go through the book planner. Christina, is there anything you would like to add?
Christina: Yep. As Karen said, right now, you'll copy and paste your headings into the outline. If it's easier, you can go through the planner and paste your content into the document itself and make sure that heading level twos are set up as heading level twos, for example, which we'll demo in the editor in a bit. But what's really useful is to go through the planner so that you can have consistent pedagogical elements. But if you want to recreate a book here, you can copy and paste content into the editor and that will allow you to get all your heading levels in there. But I think that's about it.
Karen: Great. And Richard, I see your question about images and I think we'll take a closer look at that when Christina gets to some of the outputs. And in short, yes, the pilot is limited to textbooks. Okay, Christina, I'm going to hand things back over to you.
Christina: Okay, awesome. So now we can jump to review our textbook and we can see we've got our parts here. I've left this unnamed for now, and we can see our chapter, our sections and the pedagogical elements that we've added now appear consistently making it really clear that consistency that we have. So now I'll just click "build book" and yes, I'm sure I want to build the book. So let me jump in here to that book. Now I have two books. Yes, I'm in the right version. Here we are on the book builder page, so I'll just do a quick overview of this page because I have a lot to cover today. We've got our team manager where you can add different roles, your production editors who can go through the book plan and can work on the book at any stage of the process, our copy editors who edit in suggesting mode with track changes at the edit phase, and our authors who make track changes at the review phase. So all of this by the way, is documented in our user guide.
And here you can assign your team and change permissions. You can store metadata here. You can store asset images that you want available throughout the book in the asset manager. So you can upload images here. I think the standard images are supported here, like PNG, JPEG, things like that. And we can export our book at any stage of the process and I'll demo that in a bit. So even even now that we've just done our book plan, we could even start previewing and downloading a PDF or EPUB of this book just with our heading levels that we've laid out and our empty blocks for our pedagogical elements. Taking a bit of a deeper look at the book builder page, you can add front matter components. So I've got an automatically generated table of content, so no more manually making sure page numbers are correct or updating them in design or anything like that. It's automatically generated. We can add front matter components and we can give them a type.
We can make introductions, preface, title page, half title page, a copyright page, for example. And if I wanted this to be a title page, for example, I might wish to put it above the table of contents. We can also in the body again, add more chapters and that will come through with the consistent structure we asked to have for chapters in our planning step, or we can add unnumbered components. So this is where the numbering comes in if you just want a blank chapter that's unnumbered, and of course, add more parts if you'd like to. Here we can see the first part that I gave a name, the first chapter, and then our blank chapters and blank second part. Jumping in to our first chapter, we can see that we have our H1 and that's already marked up for us and we have our pedagogical element blocks that are empty and ready for me to start writing into. So this gives you a really nice structure as an author to start adding in content.
We've also got an outline section where you can automatically generate an outline of B section H2s in your documents and you can refresh it at any time. Or you could manually add in whatever you wanted to your outline or you could add a leading sentence for example, if you want that. Let me just undo that and leave my outline where it was. I've got my sections where I can start writing into and the pedagogical elements that I added consistently to my sections are here as well, as well as my closers that I added at the end of the chapter. So now you can just start writing in. If you want something else, for example in this chapter, I want a further reading section as well, I can jump down to my pedagogical elements and add more in at this stage as well. We've also got things like short boxes such as notes, tips, warnings, reminders, which you could add at any place in the pick, long boxes such as case studies, biographies, worked examples, and display formatting like author name that you might want to put at the top of the document perhaps below the title, subtitle.
So how you could do that is just put in an author name for, example and highlight it and format it and that now has the author formatting. Or you could click on author and then just type into that and that will have the right formatting as well. Looking at our toolbar over here, we have some common formatting tools like bold, italics. We've got code formatting and you can highlight text and insert link over it. You can do some text formatting tools like strikethrough, subscript, superscript and toggling small caps on and off. You can also transform case, which is really useful when you have to do a lot of editorial work. And you can insert footnotes that you could choose to put at the end of the chapter or at the bottom of the page depending on the template that you use. We've got common numbered and ordered and unordered lists and special characters, code blocks and tables where you can choose a table of any number of rows and columns as well as our table options to delete and delete columns.
Here within our chapter we have our asset manager. So if you had uploaded any images at the book builder, you would be able to see all of the images you've uploaded here and you can select them and choose to insert them anywhere here in the chapter. So one place that would really make sense to do is in my content opener image section, we should upload an image there and insert it. And that gives you a good idea of the starting place of this chapter. On the right we can also see that we have a find and replace, really helpful when you're doing the editorial work and having to find and replace British for American spelling or anything like that. And we can also toggle between editing and suggesting mode, which makes collaboration much easier if you want to suggest changes. It's also possible to comment on anything. If you highlight something, you can add a comment in. Does anyone have any questions before I leave this page? We'll come back to this page, but while we're here.
Karen: Christina, Michael asks if there are plans for including screenshots or maybe video additions to the user guide because there's a lot of text as it is. And I will say Jamie Witman, our open educational practices specialist, will work on supportive documentation for our community along with the Ketida community. And then Christina's also been working on some demo videos, I don't know if you want to say a couple words about those.
Christina: So basically like we're doing a demo today more focused on the planner, but we'll be publishing some demo videos and hopefully going into some shorter videos for the more detailed parts of the system as well. And screenshots in the user guide is a really great idea. Okay, anything else on this page? Okay, let's jump back to the book builder where I'll just cover a couple more things here before I jump forward. So one thing you can see here is that we have these workflow stages, and it needs each component. So this is a way for the production editor who might be the project manager of the book or anyone who wants to work at any stage of the book to be able to advance the stages. So they can click through the arrows to advance the stages, and different things are allowed through permissions and roles at each of these stages. So for example, in the edit step, that's a time for copy editors to make track changes on content. The review step is time for authors to review changes and suggest their own changes. And then we have cleanup, page check and final, that just allows you to have a bit of control over the editorial process and permission as well as giving you an idea of the status of each component so that you can work collaboratively on that.
So I think what I'm going to jump into next is to show you what this might look like once we've added a bunch of our content in. So I spent a day putting together a book using that sample content I mentioned earlier, and here I've added in a title page, a copyright page, we've got an automatically generated table of content, a preface and I've added a first part just for the first chapter. So I'm going to jump into that first chapter just to give everyone an idea of what it looks like once you've written your content in here. I've got my H1 that is formatted in that way. I've got my subtitle, my author names. I've added in a content opener image and given it a caption, also possible to write out text for each of these images for accessibility. Those using a screen reader can access, for example in EPUB, the EPUB can read out the text if you're not able to view the image for any reason. We've got a learning objective section. I've added in a chapter outline, and a lot of introduction text, a focus question section.
And here starts off first section with our chapter H2, and we've got some H3s in here and some terms that have been marked as key terms. We've got maths formatting, so we are using LaTeX with MathJax. There is a lot of documentation online about how to write this, and there are even tools like Mathpix where, that's not an open source tool, but I'm sure there are others where you can take a picture of math and it will generate the MathJax for you for those that are not willing to learn MathJax notation. But here we have a basic fraction and you write MathJax by putting in a single dollar, putting in your MathJax notation and then closing that with another dollar. So again, this is in more detail in our user guide and there's some helpful links there for generating and validating your MathJax. Here I've got a worked example, and I've used that as a example and then added a self-reflection activity section in with short boxes such as a reminder to demonstrate all the formatting and layout. I've even put some poetry into the statistics book.
And since it is statistics content there are really a lot of worked examples, a lot of practice here. We've got our second section. We've got more short boxes like notes and more images that have been inserted through our asset manager. Some more tables.
Karen: Christina, as you're showing this, Amy asked if this is the view where authors will be composing, and if so, can the text pane width be adjusted?
Christina: I'm not sure I heard what you said about composing, but this is the focus view in Ketida where you can just create a more focused view with the larger text area. I just want to see what happens when you zoom, but the pane kind of stays the same. But yeah, that's really useful feedback if that is something that people are interested in, a wider text area for composition. We've used just a standard column design here.
Karen: Yeah, Amy has her eye on all the white space there on the right side.
Christina: So this white space looks like a huge waste of space until you start collaborating, because this whole pane can get filled with comments and you have all your comments down the side. And you also have track changes, modal coming down where you can accept or reject suggestions, and as well as our find and replace bar, which can take up a lot of space here. So that's kind of what that margin is being used for now, but in UX and web design we are always improving and moving forward and we are looking forward actually to a redesign of Ketida. So watch out for that. That's going to be really exciting as well as the work with Lulu that Karen mentioned earlier to support print on demand.
Karen: We also have a couple quick questions from Cheryl. She's wondering if you can incorporate a link in the image caption.
Christina: So yeah, that's a good question. I think it should be possible in an image caption to use the link feature. So for example, maybe we can find an image here if I haven't already scrolled past all of them. I can also just search for a figure. I'm not going to use my content opener image, but jump to the next one. Okay, so I'll just call this a pie chart and I can link my text here. The caption in the PDF or EPUB just appears as any other text, so it should be completely possible in screen PDFs or EPUBs for that to be clickable.
Karen: Great, thank you.
Christina: You can also paste in a link if you want, it actually just spelled out for any reason.
Karen: And as authors are working are changes auto saved?
Christina: Changes are auto saved. That used to be two seconds, but that wasn't fast enough for some of us so we've changed that down to a second. So we do have a save button if you're really worried about losing your changes, but changes are auto saved every second.
Karen: And then a couple questions about what's under the hood here. Ellen was curious if you could switch to HTML view or code view to show how some of these elements are tagged, and a little bit more about what's behind the scenes.
Christina: So we don't currently have an HTML view under the hood view here. We are using semantic markup with the left pane illustrating what markup has been applied. So we can export to HTML, that is one really exciting feature and I'll show where that is. That's the next step after this page will show how we can export HTML. And then just regarding what's being used here in Ketida, we are using the Wax editor, which is another tool that Coko works on. And that's providing the toolbar and the elements that we see here as well as the editing and suggesting mode, find and replace, comments and things like that.
Karen: And one more question, this one's from Corey and I think Corey's probably thinking about a Google versioning doc. He asks or she asked, they ask, "Is there a possibility to see previous iterations or versions? For example during editing a sentence was accidentally deleted and saved, can we access a previous save?"
Christina: Yeah, that's a great question. So version control is high on the agenda for Ketida in the future. While you're editing, normal things like Ctrl+Z to undo changes are totally possible. So we have a shortcut menu here, most of the stuff that you can do any text editor like Ms Word or Google Docs can be done in this editor as well. We don't currently have version control to roll back to something you did yesterday before you left the system, and we're really interested in scoping out in more detail what kind of version control would be useful to people.
Karen: Thanks. And Paul, I see your question, We'll just hang on to it and answer it when we get to seeing some of the PDFs.
Christina: Okay, great. So just before we jump in the PDFs, I'll just scroll down here. I think we've pretty much seen everything we've got here, but we've got some maths even in tables and ending off the chapter we have those pedagogical elements that we added earlier that have now been filled out like a key terms list section. And a chapter review section, which I've split up by H2, but you don't have to do that. A little homework box, this is kind of the thing we were talking about earlier, I've named it homework but I've put it in a review activity section because that design works for me anyway. And a references section that I've also split out into per H2 section that we had in the chapter but that isn't necessary as well as a further reading section. So now we can see what the editor looks like once we have a bunch of content actually put in there, and then the really exciting thing is to start exporting the book. So you don't have to finish your chapter before you start previewing or downloading your book, but it definitely helps to have content before you start exporting.
So let's start in the download section and I'll start by talking about ICML. So ICML provides a compress the file including all the images, and that's Adobe InDesign compatible. So that makes it really future-proof and if you ever did want to port out your content and put it into Adobe InDesign to continue design there you can, but one great thing about Ketida is that we do have support for templates through a Page.js rendering engine. You don't need to know about that, but for those interested, we're using Page.js behind the scenes to generate beautiful PDFs of your book. And currently there are five templates with unique characteristics, and we'll get into those in a moment. We also have EPUB export where we're using an EPUB checker to make sure we have a valid EPUB 3 file, and here we have two templates where you can choose to have your footnotes at the end of the chapter or at the bottom of the page.
So you can just jump straight to download a PDF, but you can also use the preview window to just open a PDF in your browser. And this is where we get into the exciting realm of automated type settings. So I can choose a template and this is going to open a preview window. Because I'm logged in as a global production editor, I have access to the CSS window that shows me the cascading style sheets that make this design possible. And here I've got my book rendering over here. So before I jump into the PDF and a deeper dive on that, just a quick note on the CSS for those who are interested. These style sheets define all the styles such as accent, colors, font, heading levels, box styles, and it is possible depending on your roles to do things like change the font size for H1s here and then regenerate your PDF. Or something that's quite an interesting use case to me is if you had a second book in a series and you really like this design but you wanted to just change the accent color to red, you could change the accent color in one place in the CSS and have this all automatically regenerate in less than a minute. So that's really one exciting thing about automated type settings.
It also means that you can edit your content and come to an export of your content within a minute. You don't have to have a back and forth on an email thread with a designer to make a minor change in your PDF. So I'm going to open this up. Well, firstly to come back to the question about HTML download, this is where you can download your HTML, and if you do want the CSS that's used here, you can just grab the CSS file as well. So I'm just going to click print and that will just open this up in a new window so we can see the double page spread, and now we can see it actually rendering in the browser in a couple of seconds. And if you're fast enough you can get to the table of contents before the page numbers fill themselves out. So those are all generated automatically so they are always correct. So here we are in our first template. This is the Apollo template, I'll actually have that one open here too. And this one is using a blue accent color, it's got a larger page size than some of the others so we can make use of things like sidebar elements for our short boxes.
We have sans-serif font for the H1, we've got our figure caption for our figure opener in the lower right-hand corner, and we've got running footers for the titles and these page numbers on the outer corner. So that's just one of the templates and really there's a number of features. I mean, I could go on about this template for a long time. We've got our math rendering, our tables, our key templates just to show a few things. Our chapter review in a double column design, and our references also in a double column design with the accent color as a shading behind the references page. And then our empty part that we've added, we can see the empty placeholder part title there and we can fill that in as well as our end matter. Basically from here you can go back to the book and you want to try out a different template. You can just try another one and do the same thing, it will automatically generate in the browser in a minute. So I've already done this four or five of them. And the next one I'll show, let me just scroll back to the top, is called Aphrodite. And this is a bit of a smaller page size and it's more of a funky design may be more appropriate for a humanities subject.
We've got a table of content and some front matter, our part page opener and our chapter opener, where in this case we've got our bigger caption displaying on the opener image. Obviously we've got a different accent color here. Now we have a serif font being used on the H1 for example. Our page numbers are centered at the bottom of the page, and we've got our maths rendering and all the usual stuff. Our short boxes are now within the main column of text because we don't have a huge sidebar to play with as we did in the bigger page size. And scrolling down, we have our same images that we input. And I really think these designs are really beautiful and they have a lot of unique characteristics. Here we have our long boxes that now have shading, and I just want to jump down. Some of our other long boxes just have a line indicating where they start and end. We've got our key terms list and our chapter review, which again has the squiggly lines as well as our references and our further reading.
Okay, I'm going to quickly jump to these other templates so I can leave time for more questions. This one, Denita, uses this green accent color and has a lot of these green blocks on H2s and things like that. Here we have running headers this time, the usual stuff like our math rendering is all there. We've also got gray shading in this case. We have sidebar elements again since the page five is bigger. And let me jump to Gaia, where I can again scroll to the top 'cause I've been scrolling through these before I started demoing. Gaia has a lot of these rounded elements and CSS designs actually putting in some designs there. We've got our table of contents and our front matter already showing these rounded circular shading elements. Our part page design and our chapter opener page with the rounded corners on all the boxes. Each of them can use different fonts and different combinations of serif and sans-serif fonts for things like boxes and headings. And here we've got a dotted line delineating where the longer boxes start and end and our sidebar elements again with the rounded elements. And these long boxes, I really like these that have shading stretching across the page.
And then the last template I want to show today before I take some more questions, again, I'll scroll up. You don't have to scroll up, I had just scrolled down after exporting them. So they do open on the first page when you generate them. Again, here we have some CSS design happening. And here we've got running headers with this line ending in the page number on the top of the page. Our part page opener, our chapter opener. Shading on boxes. Sidebar elements using a thicker block on the outer corner. So you can really see how each of these has a bit of a different style. And the automated type setting lays things out, analyzes the HTML, combines that with CSS, using the Page.js rendering engine, which none of that stuff you have to worry about. You offer your content through the planner and into the editor and choose a template and see which design works best for your book, and then you can choose which one you want to use to actually print out your book.
So these are just the PDF templates. There are EPUB templates as well that admittedly aren't as beautiful as a PDF template. Something we're also interested in is matching the PDF templates to EPUB templates as well. So you could have the same design or quite similar at least because not as much as possible in EPUB, but have the same design in your EPUB as well at least to represent the character of the design you've chosen.
Karen: Great, thank you Christina. We have a few questions, and if we don't get to all of them I will put my email address in the chat so that we can continue the conversation. Speaking of EPUBS, Corey asked if the EPUB export is a reflowable EPUB. And if so, where the sidebars appear, are they anchored so they appear along with the related content?
Christina: So I believe that it's a reflowable EPUB so that depending on the size of your EPUB reader or the size of the window within which you're using an EPUB reader, the content simply reflows and we haven't got as complex design elements there. So if you created a short box in the edit, that will still be a short box, but we don't have these exact templates. Here for example, we have sidebar elements, so these sidebar elements appear in the main flow of text in the exact position they were placed in the editor when putting them into EPUB export. And I imagine if we did adapt these PDF templates for EPUB as well. So we do have two EPUB templates available, but for example, if we tried to match this exact PDF template for EPUB, we would likely put this in the main text.
But I'm the project manager at Ketida so I'm always interested to hear what our Page.js gurus at Coko and our external designers and those who are really interested in print media, who know a lot more than I do about developing for print media, what they have to say about that. And they do love a challenge, so we'll see if sidebar elements, they get into EPUB or if they just get into the main text.
Karen: And then back to Paul, I think we may have addressed your question. Paul asked, "If it's possible to have a book whose layout and organization can be customized for a specific purpose. For example, I have a linear algebra primer that I use for several classes, but I use different sections and modify the order a little depending on the class. Or I think the open intro stats project has three different layouts for the same content depending on the focus of a class." So you could use some of the different templates that Christina showed. I'm not sure if there's anything more that may address that particular question. Let me know Paul if you have more on your mind about that. And then Cindy asks about accessibility. Can you speak briefly to accessibility features?
Christina: Yeah, that's a really great question. So in designing these templates, with automated type setting it's easy to frame it as in you don't need a designer to go back and forth and make changes to your PDF. But as Karen mentioned, design is so important not just because of the beauty and the enriching experience of engaging with a book, but also for things like accessibility. So we made sure in the initial designs that the color palettes used were WCAG 2.1 AA compliant so that there is a high enough contrast between the colors used for text and shading and headings and all of that stuff. So that when they're printed at their page size, that they are accessible to that standard. And then of course, the images aren't generated by Ketida, so that's really important if you are working with something like graphs to have them be accessible. I can't speak to accessibility of these graphs in particular, but there are certain suggestions around how you can make images more accessible in general.
And then things like alt text as I mentioned, screen readers can read the alt text behind an image in a PDF or EPUB if you have included those in the editor. Above your caption there's a section for alt text. If there's anything else in particular about accessibility you have in mind, do let us know.
Karen: Great. And with a minute left, I think we may actually cover all of the questions. Amy asked if there was a two column layout in the template so far. I'm not sure if there is, but there could certainly be one in the pipeline.
Christina: So that hasn't been something we planned for or worked on yet. We do have two column designs for certain things like the chapter review that I demoed in one of the templates earlier, but it's totally possible to create a two column layout in Page.js templates. So if that's something that people want, we'd be really interested in that feedback. And this is all the kind of stuff we are hoping will come from the OEN pilot to get some really valuable feedback on how these templates are working for people, how Ketida and in particular the open textbook planner is helping people to structure and author and export their content. So really looking forward to that, and I think we'll get some really valuable feedback there.
Karen: Thanks so much for bringing that up to Christina. That's absolutely right, these are all of the kind of requests that we want to hear from you. A web book is not one of the outputs via Ketida. Correct me if I'm wrong Christina, the emphasis is on the three format types she shared at the beginning, and so you would need an institutional repository or some other location to keep the files. If this is an obstacle, please let me know. We are at the end of the hour, so if you're looking at the pilot documentation and you have any questions about it or if you think of more questions about Ketida and the open textbook planner, once our time has concluded don't hesitate to reach out. I just put my email there in the chat. It's K-L-A-U- R-I-T-S@U-M-N.edu. Really excited to start collaborating and working with as many of you as is possible on continuing to develop these tools. Please join me in thanking Christina for her excellent and thorough demo. Really appreciate all of your expertise on these tools and look forward to moving forward. So thanks everybody and see you again soon.
Christina: Great, thank you so much Karen. And just on the last note about the web book, we are always seeing how we can extend Ketida and we have discussions in the works at the moment of how we can integrate to have web exports of books in Ketida as well. There's a lot in the pipeline and all of that pilot feedback for the most wanted features will be really useful. Thanks so much everyone for joining, and do check out that pilot documentation if you're interested.
Karen: Thanks again everyone. See you soon.
END OF VIDEO
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Host Karen Lauritsen of the Open Education Network is joined by Christina Tromp, Coko Foundation project manager, to review and discuss the Open Textbook Planner and Ketida publishing tools.
Watch the video recording of this session or keep reading for a full transcript. For those interested in reading the conversation that took place among participants and the resources shared, the chat transcript is also available below.
Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please contact Tonia.
Audio Transcript
Speakers:
- Karen Lauritsen (Senior Director, Publishing; Open Education Network)
- Christina Tromp (Project Manager, Coko Foundation)
Karen: Hello, and welcome everybody. My name's Karen Lauritsen, I'm with the Open Education Network. And today we're joined by Christina Tromp from the Coko Foundation who will demo the new Open Textbook Planner and Ketida, an open source publishing platform. We're delighted that you could join us today. We know you are all very busy, and I just want to take this opportunity to thank you for all of the work you do to make education more equitable, accessible, and affordable through open education. So I have about five minutes of preamble here just to set the context and then I'll hand things over to Christina. So as many of you know, since you are involved in publishing open textbooks and involved in the open education community, we are committed to supporting multiple pathways to writing and publishing open textbooks because we are made up of a broad community of users and institutions.
And together we know there are many, many ways to publish a book and we work to offer options for the many different contexts in which publishing happens. For example, we work with Pressbooks, Scribe and Manifold, each of which support the open education community in their own way. And really at the end of the day, our goal is to support you, the human beings who support open textbook authors and manage publishing programs at your library and institution. And just taking that a little bit further, very broadly, our vision is to support anyone who wants to publish an open textbook, including those authors who are at institutions with fewer resources. And we really started to explore how the OEN can provide access to publishing infrastructure in the last couple of years for those, for example, who may not be able to provide their own instance of a platform. And one of the ways we've been exploring this is with the Manifold pilot, for example. And please look for an update about the Manifold pilot coming in the next couple months.
We think that Ketida and the Open Textbook Planner are exciting additions to the existing publishing pathways. It's really easy to equate publishing with a tool or platform, but everyone here knows that publishing is a really human process. And by human, I mean it can be emotional, it can be messy, and even the best tool in the world won't make writing a book a quick, easy, simple thing for most people. And that reality is really a key reason why our community is so important and time and again, it's really exciting and encouraging to see how all of you support one another in a variety of ways because it's so critical to the work that we're all doing regardless of the cool tools that are out there. So with that said, these are really cool tools. Ketida makes beautiful books. And for any of you who were at the Library Publishing Forum session last week, you'll have to sit through this little part again, but I just want to just say a word on behalf of beauty.
And while beauty's in the eye of the beholder, I think most of us would agree a beautiful book is really a pleasure to read. It presents the story and information in a consistent and engaging way that guides the reader on a journey. And maybe that journey is through time or science or space or history. Whatever the subject, most authors are interested in structuring that journey for their reader the best they can, and that's especially true for textbooks. Being beautiful means being well-designed and being well-designed means working well for the purpose at hand. So beauty in my opinion, is not really a bonus. We all deserve beauty, including students who are using open educational resources and the faculty and instructors and students who spend their time making those resources. So with that said, a little background about this project. We started working with the Coko Foundation in 2019 with an IMLS grant and an advisory group of eight OEN members who were committed to developing support for authors who want to create a consistent structured textbook. Thanks to everyone who is involved for their contributions.
The idea that we went into was really to create a tool to support authors in structuring their books before they start writing. We wanted to help them select the pedagogical elements which are so unique to textbooks so that they could present their information in a consistent way. We also talked a lot about helping authors focus on creating content and being able to really use their subject expertise while removing some of the pressures of formatting and designing a book. So in other words, we wanted to separate the content from the design so that authors could focus on writing and then still come out with a consistent textbook through styles rather than say more manual formatting. And this also means that something is more accessible. After an author plans and match their books in the Open Textbook Planner, they are moved into Ketida, which allows people to work collaboratively on creating a book in most of the ways you would expect. After that, the author can select one of several textbook templates created for the OEN and then use those templates to create EPUBs and PDFs.
And Coko is also developing a relationship with Lulu for print on demand, which I know has been sort of an ongoing challenge for many who want to provide print copies. If after today you are intrigued and want to get your hands on these tools and start playing with them, I hope you will join us in our pilot. I'll drop the documentation into the chat as soon as I'm finished with my preamble. But really, essentially the idea is to get a group using tools, see how they work for your open ed publishing programs, make some new textbooks and continue to provide feedback so that we can inspire future iterations of the Open Textbook Planner and Ketida because although the IMLS grant has ended, both of our organizations, both the OEN and Coko, are really looking forward to continuing to learn from the OER publishing community and improve the tools. Finally, I'll just say it's been really great working with Christina, also with Adam Hyde, Dione Mentis and others at Coko for many reasons, including they're also quite committed to community and community development.
And so I'm going to hand things over to Christina. She's going to show you the specifics of what I've been talking about so far. As I mentioned before, we started formally recording this session. Please, as you come up with your questions, drop them in the chat, use the Q&A. I will keep my eye on both, and we'll pause periodically to address whatever comes up. Christina Tromp is a project manager with the Coko Foundation. She's going to demonstrate the Open Textbook Planner and Ketida. Christina, we're so excited you're here, and over to you.
Christina: Thanks, Karen. Okay, if anyone can't see my screen, please let me know. But here I am inside Ketida on the dashboard. I've just got one book here for the moment. I've already created a sample book, so we have a bunch of content to demo with today. But since we do want to really focus on how you can plan your book and structure it right from the start, I'm going to add a new book and show you how you can plan in Ketida. So Ketida is an open source tool. This instance is being hosted through the OEN. They've arranged that hosting, and in this instance we have an Open Textbook Planner enabled that allows you to start a new book. So I'm going to work on a statistics book today for business statistics. I'm referencing a sample OpenStax book that you can find on openstax.org. And once I've created my book title, which global production editors will do this, we do have a number of roles in Ketida, and I'll get a bit deeper into that later.
But once a book has been created, a global production editor would typically assign a production editor who would be the project manager of the book. So if there's any questions at this stage, let me know, otherwise, I'll show how to assign members right from the start. So the book has been created and now a production editor could be added who would be responsible for completing the book plan. Once you have created the book, you can jump into plan your book, and here we've split the Open Textbook Planner into four stages. The first being to determine your book structure, then to outline the content, add pedagogical elements, and then a textbook review before you actually jump into authoring. So this really helps to create a consistent reading experience. When we first jump in, we'll choose our hierarchy for our structure. Either you would choose typically chapters with sections in them or parts with chapters and sections within each part. So for the purposes of demoing more rather than less, I'll do parts, chapters, and sections today. And then I'll jump to the next step, which is to outline the content. You can go back in steps as well.
So in the outline content step, you can add as many levels as you'd like to build a content outline. If you're not sure of your outline yet, you can jump ahead and always add more parts, chapters, and sections in the editor or the book builder at a later stage. But if you have a rough idea of what you want at this stage, it is really helpful to start building out your textbook outline for the things you already know you want. One really helpful thing here is that you can clone things. So for example, if I know that in every chapter I want at least three sections, I can just use the clone tool to add those sections in. And perhaps I know that in each part I want at least two chapters, so I could use the clone tool again to create two chapters in this part, and I could clone again this whole part, which will take over the two chapters with three sections in them. So here we go. I've cloned my second part. What's also possible is to drag and drop parts, chapters and sections if you have not such a repetitive or consistent outline.
For example, if in the first chapter, you have four sections instead of three, you can just drop an extra section in there. So I'm not going to make a very long book today, but I think we have a good outline to start demoing with. And the next thing I can do here is to add in some titles if I know what they are already. Maybe you don't know what your titles are, and that's fine, you can add them at the editing step. But if you do know what they are, you could put them in here. So I'm going to jump to one of my PDFs and jump to the table of contents. I'll get back to these PDFs a bit later, but my table of contents will give me what I need to start filling out my part and chapter title. So I'm going to put in my first part. I think I'm going to just leave it at that. And then my chapter, I think I'm going to make sampling and data. And then I'm just going to grab my H2s or my sections for my first chapter and put these in here.
So it's entirely possible to do this kind of conceptualization of what you want your book to include on paper or on email with your colleague who you're collaborating with or in your preferred environment, but the Open Book Planner in Ketida does allow you to use this as your primary planning and authoring environment. I have a pretty good idea of what I want in my first chapter and the sections for that. I'm not sure about the second chapter yet, or the second part in those chapters, so I can easily leave those blank. And either I could put placeholders and just call it chapter two for now and edit that later, or I can just leave it open and Ketida will allow us an empty untitled block with a placeholder that we can edit later. Before I move on to the next step, pedagogical elements, is there anything anyone wants to ask here? Cool. Okay. We can always get to questions about any of these steps later as well. It's of course also possible here to delete things if you've made a mistake or to edit things here.
So I'll jump to the next step, which is to add pedagogical elements. We have our hierarchy, we have our outline, and now we're choosing pedagogical elements that should apply consistently through the textbook. We split them into openers, which typically prepare the learner for content and what they will learn and closers, which typically reinforce the content that's already been learned. And we have some that could be used as openers or closers or anywhere in the text for that matter. So I think this is really the key of the planner here, the core activity that's really so important and so useful, is that it allows you to add these pedagogical elements consistently to parts, chapters, and sections so that the learner has a consistent reading experience. It's an interesting reading experience that they're engaged with because it's not just long forms of text and things are broken up into ways that make sense. So here we can drag and drop pedagogical elements from the right into the left wherever we want them.
So for example, if I want to content opener image at the start of each part, I think I'd also want one at the start of each chapter to have some visual elements kicking things off. And then I could have an introduction at the start of each chapter followed by a chapter outline. And perhaps I want some focus questions as well, perhaps before the introduction. Then perhaps in each section or at the end of each chapter, I want a review activity. I also want a bibliography at the end of each chapter. Let me drag that properly. And we could also put a summary, for example, at the end of every chapter before they dive into the review activity. And really it's possible to add any number of these pedagogical elements to each part, chapter and section. If you do want to add more of these in later at the editor step, you can do that. If you've added these inconsistently here and then you find at the editor step that in one section, you just don't want... Let's say for example, I added a key terms list to the start of every section. In one section, you just don't want a key terms list, it's not appropriate. So you could remove that at the editor stage. So each of these things will appear consistently in every part, chapter and section, and the next step will be to review the textbook. Unless there's any questions at the stage.
Karen: We do actually have a couple questions, Christina.
Christina: Great.
Karen: So earlier in your demo, I think when you were putting in the subsections and you were copying from the OpenStax book, you had some numbering. And so Jonathan asked if numbering is by hand, as in the section titles you cut and pasted.
Christina: Yeah. So if I jump to the next step, we'll see that numbering here. So I think you're referring to my H2 numbering for the section. So in this case, sections are not numbered, which allows you to do things like A, B and C or have sections without numbering, if you like. Once we get into the book builder, I'll demonstrate how chapters can be created as chapters or unnumbered components. So sometimes you want a chapter that isn't numbered, but chapters in general are numbered. You may have chapters you don't want numbered so you can mark those as unnumbered components. And a lot of this also comes into play with the templates that I'll demonstrate later. So templates, it's possible to add different templates for different numbering styles that people want. So some of the templates have, for example, numbered chapters, and the ones that I have today have auto numbered chapters, but we've left sections without default numbering. That gives more flexibility to the user.
Karen: Thank you. And just to follow up, he also asked if the menu of pedagogical elements is fixed and what if there's an element I want to use but isn't listed? And Jonathan, it is currently fixed. This is the menu of elements that we came up with in the advisory group, and part of the flexibility that Christina's been talking about I think will also allow you to use an element perhaps not totally exactly as it may be described in the list there. I think you'll find that there's some flexibility, but we really worked pretty hard to try and get as many representative elements as we could. Christina, is there anything you would add to that?
Christina: Sure, yeah. So as Karen mentioned, you could use a review activity or a self-reflection activity as a worked example, for example. So that might not be semantically completely accurate, but it will give you styling that depending on what design you're after, should work for the content that you're presenting. And also, there are some ways in Ketida to add custom inline styles or custom block styles, but that just requires us to add some more styling for that. Once you have a custom block or a custom inline format that it's fine to have that shown in the editor, but then how does that get transformed when you export a PDF or an EPUB? So those styles just need to be put in place. And I'm sure this kind of feedback is four things that people feel might be missing is really valuable in the pilot and will be very interested to see what the most popular requests are.
Karen: Absolutely. Related to that, Kristen asked where you put in question and answers, Kristen, are you thinking interactively or just kind of a Q&A? While Kristen considers that, we have one more question that Amy asked about copying and pasting outline elements and if there will be a tool to import if a book is starting from a known outline. For example, the outline is in a different format like a Google Doc or a book is based on a previously published OER. Amy, in short, Ketida does enable such things, but for the pilot, we really want to learn about how this particular book planner process works. And so there won't be an import feature for the pilot because we want everyone to go through the book planner. Christina, is there anything you would like to add?
Christina: Yep. As Karen said, right now, you'll copy and paste your headings into the outline. If it's easier, you can go through the planner and paste your content into the document itself and make sure that heading level twos are set up as heading level twos, for example, which we'll demo in the editor in a bit. But what's really useful is to go through the planner so that you can have consistent pedagogical elements. But if you want to recreate a book here, you can copy and paste content into the editor and that will allow you to get all your heading levels in there. But I think that's about it.
Karen: Great. And Richard, I see your question about images and I think we'll take a closer look at that when Christina gets to some of the outputs. And in short, yes, the pilot is limited to textbooks. Okay, Christina, I'm going to hand things back over to you.
Christina: Okay, awesome. So now we can jump to review our textbook and we can see we've got our parts here. I've left this unnamed for now, and we can see our chapter, our sections and the pedagogical elements that we've added now appear consistently making it really clear that consistency that we have. So now I'll just click "build book" and yes, I'm sure I want to build the book. So let me jump in here to that book. Now I have two books. Yes, I'm in the right version. Here we are on the book builder page, so I'll just do a quick overview of this page because I have a lot to cover today. We've got our team manager where you can add different roles, your production editors who can go through the book plan and can work on the book at any stage of the process, our copy editors who edit in suggesting mode with track changes at the edit phase, and our authors who make track changes at the review phase. So all of this by the way, is documented in our user guide.
And here you can assign your team and change permissions. You can store metadata here. You can store asset images that you want available throughout the book in the asset manager. So you can upload images here. I think the standard images are supported here, like PNG, JPEG, things like that. And we can export our book at any stage of the process and I'll demo that in a bit. So even even now that we've just done our book plan, we could even start previewing and downloading a PDF or EPUB of this book just with our heading levels that we've laid out and our empty blocks for our pedagogical elements. Taking a bit of a deeper look at the book builder page, you can add front matter components. So I've got an automatically generated table of content, so no more manually making sure page numbers are correct or updating them in design or anything like that. It's automatically generated. We can add front matter components and we can give them a type.
We can make introductions, preface, title page, half title page, a copyright page, for example. And if I wanted this to be a title page, for example, I might wish to put it above the table of contents. We can also in the body again, add more chapters and that will come through with the consistent structure we asked to have for chapters in our planning step, or we can add unnumbered components. So this is where the numbering comes in if you just want a blank chapter that's unnumbered, and of course, add more parts if you'd like to. Here we can see the first part that I gave a name, the first chapter, and then our blank chapters and blank second part. Jumping in to our first chapter, we can see that we have our H1 and that's already marked up for us and we have our pedagogical element blocks that are empty and ready for me to start writing into. So this gives you a really nice structure as an author to start adding in content.
We've also got an outline section where you can automatically generate an outline of B section H2s in your documents and you can refresh it at any time. Or you could manually add in whatever you wanted to your outline or you could add a leading sentence for example, if you want that. Let me just undo that and leave my outline where it was. I've got my sections where I can start writing into and the pedagogical elements that I added consistently to my sections are here as well, as well as my closers that I added at the end of the chapter. So now you can just start writing in. If you want something else, for example in this chapter, I want a further reading section as well, I can jump down to my pedagogical elements and add more in at this stage as well. We've also got things like short boxes such as notes, tips, warnings, reminders, which you could add at any place in the pick, long boxes such as case studies, biographies, worked examples, and display formatting like author name that you might want to put at the top of the document perhaps below the title, subtitle.
So how you could do that is just put in an author name for, example and highlight it and format it and that now has the author formatting. Or you could click on author and then just type into that and that will have the right formatting as well. Looking at our toolbar over here, we have some common formatting tools like bold, italics. We've got code formatting and you can highlight text and insert link over it. You can do some text formatting tools like strikethrough, subscript, superscript and toggling small caps on and off. You can also transform case, which is really useful when you have to do a lot of editorial work. And you can insert footnotes that you could choose to put at the end of the chapter or at the bottom of the page depending on the template that you use. We've got common numbered and ordered and unordered lists and special characters, code blocks and tables where you can choose a table of any number of rows and columns as well as our table options to delete and delete columns.
Here within our chapter we have our asset manager. So if you had uploaded any images at the book builder, you would be able to see all of the images you've uploaded here and you can select them and choose to insert them anywhere here in the chapter. So one place that would really make sense to do is in my content opener image section, we should upload an image there and insert it. And that gives you a good idea of the starting place of this chapter. On the right we can also see that we have a find and replace, really helpful when you're doing the editorial work and having to find and replace British for American spelling or anything like that. And we can also toggle between editing and suggesting mode, which makes collaboration much easier if you want to suggest changes. It's also possible to comment on anything. If you highlight something, you can add a comment in. Does anyone have any questions before I leave this page? We'll come back to this page, but while we're here.
Karen: Christina, Michael asks if there are plans for including screenshots or maybe video additions to the user guide because there's a lot of text as it is. And I will say Jamie Witman, our open educational practices specialist, will work on supportive documentation for our community along with the Ketida community. And then Christina's also been working on some demo videos, I don't know if you want to say a couple words about those.
Christina: So basically like we're doing a demo today more focused on the planner, but we'll be publishing some demo videos and hopefully going into some shorter videos for the more detailed parts of the system as well. And screenshots in the user guide is a really great idea. Okay, anything else on this page? Okay, let's jump back to the book builder where I'll just cover a couple more things here before I jump forward. So one thing you can see here is that we have these workflow stages, and it needs each component. So this is a way for the production editor who might be the project manager of the book or anyone who wants to work at any stage of the book to be able to advance the stages. So they can click through the arrows to advance the stages, and different things are allowed through permissions and roles at each of these stages. So for example, in the edit step, that's a time for copy editors to make track changes on content. The review step is time for authors to review changes and suggest their own changes. And then we have cleanup, page check and final, that just allows you to have a bit of control over the editorial process and permission as well as giving you an idea of the status of each component so that you can work collaboratively on that.
So I think what I'm going to jump into next is to show you what this might look like once we've added a bunch of our content in. So I spent a day putting together a book using that sample content I mentioned earlier, and here I've added in a title page, a copyright page, we've got an automatically generated table of content, a preface and I've added a first part just for the first chapter. So I'm going to jump into that first chapter just to give everyone an idea of what it looks like once you've written your content in here. I've got my H1 that is formatted in that way. I've got my subtitle, my author names. I've added in a content opener image and given it a caption, also possible to write out text for each of these images for accessibility. Those using a screen reader can access, for example in EPUB, the EPUB can read out the text if you're not able to view the image for any reason. We've got a learning objective section. I've added in a chapter outline, and a lot of introduction text, a focus question section.
And here starts off first section with our chapter H2, and we've got some H3s in here and some terms that have been marked as key terms. We've got maths formatting, so we are using LaTeX with MathJax. There is a lot of documentation online about how to write this, and there are even tools like Mathpix where, that's not an open source tool, but I'm sure there are others where you can take a picture of math and it will generate the MathJax for you for those that are not willing to learn MathJax notation. But here we have a basic fraction and you write MathJax by putting in a single dollar, putting in your MathJax notation and then closing that with another dollar. So again, this is in more detail in our user guide and there's some helpful links there for generating and validating your MathJax. Here I've got a worked example, and I've used that as a example and then added a self-reflection activity section in with short boxes such as a reminder to demonstrate all the formatting and layout. I've even put some poetry into the statistics book.
And since it is statistics content there are really a lot of worked examples, a lot of practice here. We've got our second section. We've got more short boxes like notes and more images that have been inserted through our asset manager. Some more tables.
Karen: Christina, as you're showing this, Amy asked if this is the view where authors will be composing, and if so, can the text pane width be adjusted?
Christina: I'm not sure I heard what you said about composing, but this is the focus view in Ketida where you can just create a more focused view with the larger text area. I just want to see what happens when you zoom, but the pane kind of stays the same. But yeah, that's really useful feedback if that is something that people are interested in, a wider text area for composition. We've used just a standard column design here.
Karen: Yeah, Amy has her eye on all the white space there on the right side.
Christina: So this white space looks like a huge waste of space until you start collaborating, because this whole pane can get filled with comments and you have all your comments down the side. And you also have track changes, modal coming down where you can accept or reject suggestions, and as well as our find and replace bar, which can take up a lot of space here. So that's kind of what that margin is being used for now, but in UX and web design we are always improving and moving forward and we are looking forward actually to a redesign of Ketida. So watch out for that. That's going to be really exciting as well as the work with Lulu that Karen mentioned earlier to support print on demand.
Karen: We also have a couple quick questions from Cheryl. She's wondering if you can incorporate a link in the image caption.
Christina: So yeah, that's a good question. I think it should be possible in an image caption to use the link feature. So for example, maybe we can find an image here if I haven't already scrolled past all of them. I can also just search for a figure. I'm not going to use my content opener image, but jump to the next one. Okay, so I'll just call this a pie chart and I can link my text here. The caption in the PDF or EPUB just appears as any other text, so it should be completely possible in screen PDFs or EPUBs for that to be clickable.
Karen: Great, thank you.
Christina: You can also paste in a link if you want, it actually just spelled out for any reason.
Karen: And as authors are working are changes auto saved?
Christina: Changes are auto saved. That used to be two seconds, but that wasn't fast enough for some of us so we've changed that down to a second. So we do have a save button if you're really worried about losing your changes, but changes are auto saved every second.
Karen: And then a couple questions about what's under the hood here. Ellen was curious if you could switch to HTML view or code view to show how some of these elements are tagged, and a little bit more about what's behind the scenes.
Christina: So we don't currently have an HTML view under the hood view here. We are using semantic markup with the left pane illustrating what markup has been applied. So we can export to HTML, that is one really exciting feature and I'll show where that is. That's the next step after this page will show how we can export HTML. And then just regarding what's being used here in Ketida, we are using the Wax editor, which is another tool that Coko works on. And that's providing the toolbar and the elements that we see here as well as the editing and suggesting mode, find and replace, comments and things like that.
Karen: And one more question, this one's from Corey and I think Corey's probably thinking about a Google versioning doc. He asks or she asked, they ask, "Is there a possibility to see previous iterations or versions? For example during editing a sentence was accidentally deleted and saved, can we access a previous save?"
Christina: Yeah, that's a great question. So version control is high on the agenda for Ketida in the future. While you're editing, normal things like Ctrl+Z to undo changes are totally possible. So we have a shortcut menu here, most of the stuff that you can do any text editor like Ms Word or Google Docs can be done in this editor as well. We don't currently have version control to roll back to something you did yesterday before you left the system, and we're really interested in scoping out in more detail what kind of version control would be useful to people.
Karen: Thanks. And Paul, I see your question, We'll just hang on to it and answer it when we get to seeing some of the PDFs.
Christina: Okay, great. So just before we jump in the PDFs, I'll just scroll down here. I think we've pretty much seen everything we've got here, but we've got some maths even in tables and ending off the chapter we have those pedagogical elements that we added earlier that have now been filled out like a key terms list section. And a chapter review section, which I've split up by H2, but you don't have to do that. A little homework box, this is kind of the thing we were talking about earlier, I've named it homework but I've put it in a review activity section because that design works for me anyway. And a references section that I've also split out into per H2 section that we had in the chapter but that isn't necessary as well as a further reading section. So now we can see what the editor looks like once we have a bunch of content actually put in there, and then the really exciting thing is to start exporting the book. So you don't have to finish your chapter before you start previewing or downloading your book, but it definitely helps to have content before you start exporting.
So let's start in the download section and I'll start by talking about ICML. So ICML provides a compress the file including all the images, and that's Adobe InDesign compatible. So that makes it really future-proof and if you ever did want to port out your content and put it into Adobe InDesign to continue design there you can, but one great thing about Ketida is that we do have support for templates through a Page.js rendering engine. You don't need to know about that, but for those interested, we're using Page.js behind the scenes to generate beautiful PDFs of your book. And currently there are five templates with unique characteristics, and we'll get into those in a moment. We also have EPUB export where we're using an EPUB checker to make sure we have a valid EPUB 3 file, and here we have two templates where you can choose to have your footnotes at the end of the chapter or at the bottom of the page.
So you can just jump straight to download a PDF, but you can also use the preview window to just open a PDF in your browser. And this is where we get into the exciting realm of automated type settings. So I can choose a template and this is going to open a preview window. Because I'm logged in as a global production editor, I have access to the CSS window that shows me the cascading style sheets that make this design possible. And here I've got my book rendering over here. So before I jump into the PDF and a deeper dive on that, just a quick note on the CSS for those who are interested. These style sheets define all the styles such as accent, colors, font, heading levels, box styles, and it is possible depending on your roles to do things like change the font size for H1s here and then regenerate your PDF. Or something that's quite an interesting use case to me is if you had a second book in a series and you really like this design but you wanted to just change the accent color to red, you could change the accent color in one place in the CSS and have this all automatically regenerate in less than a minute. So that's really one exciting thing about automated type settings.
It also means that you can edit your content and come to an export of your content within a minute. You don't have to have a back and forth on an email thread with a designer to make a minor change in your PDF. So I'm going to open this up. Well, firstly to come back to the question about HTML download, this is where you can download your HTML, and if you do want the CSS that's used here, you can just grab the CSS file as well. So I'm just going to click print and that will just open this up in a new window so we can see the double page spread, and now we can see it actually rendering in the browser in a couple of seconds. And if you're fast enough you can get to the table of contents before the page numbers fill themselves out. So those are all generated automatically so they are always correct. So here we are in our first template. This is the Apollo template, I'll actually have that one open here too. And this one is using a blue accent color, it's got a larger page size than some of the others so we can make use of things like sidebar elements for our short boxes.
We have sans-serif font for the H1, we've got our figure caption for our figure opener in the lower right-hand corner, and we've got running footers for the titles and these page numbers on the outer corner. So that's just one of the templates and really there's a number of features. I mean, I could go on about this template for a long time. We've got our math rendering, our tables, our key templates just to show a few things. Our chapter review in a double column design, and our references also in a double column design with the accent color as a shading behind the references page. And then our empty part that we've added, we can see the empty placeholder part title there and we can fill that in as well as our end matter. Basically from here you can go back to the book and you want to try out a different template. You can just try another one and do the same thing, it will automatically generate in the browser in a minute. So I've already done this four or five of them. And the next one I'll show, let me just scroll back to the top, is called Aphrodite. And this is a bit of a smaller page size and it's more of a funky design may be more appropriate for a humanities subject.
We've got a table of content and some front matter, our part page opener and our chapter opener, where in this case we've got our bigger caption displaying on the opener image. Obviously we've got a different accent color here. Now we have a serif font being used on the H1 for example. Our page numbers are centered at the bottom of the page, and we've got our maths rendering and all the usual stuff. Our short boxes are now within the main column of text because we don't have a huge sidebar to play with as we did in the bigger page size. And scrolling down, we have our same images that we input. And I really think these designs are really beautiful and they have a lot of unique characteristics. Here we have our long boxes that now have shading, and I just want to jump down. Some of our other long boxes just have a line indicating where they start and end. We've got our key terms list and our chapter review, which again has the squiggly lines as well as our references and our further reading.
Okay, I'm going to quickly jump to these other templates so I can leave time for more questions. This one, Denita, uses this green accent color and has a lot of these green blocks on H2s and things like that. Here we have running headers this time, the usual stuff like our math rendering is all there. We've also got gray shading in this case. We have sidebar elements again since the page five is bigger. And let me jump to Gaia, where I can again scroll to the top 'cause I've been scrolling through these before I started demoing. Gaia has a lot of these rounded elements and CSS designs actually putting in some designs there. We've got our table of contents and our front matter already showing these rounded circular shading elements. Our part page design and our chapter opener page with the rounded corners on all the boxes. Each of them can use different fonts and different combinations of serif and sans-serif fonts for things like boxes and headings. And here we've got a dotted line delineating where the longer boxes start and end and our sidebar elements again with the rounded elements. And these long boxes, I really like these that have shading stretching across the page.
And then the last template I want to show today before I take some more questions, again, I'll scroll up. You don't have to scroll up, I had just scrolled down after exporting them. So they do open on the first page when you generate them. Again, here we have some CSS design happening. And here we've got running headers with this line ending in the page number on the top of the page. Our part page opener, our chapter opener. Shading on boxes. Sidebar elements using a thicker block on the outer corner. So you can really see how each of these has a bit of a different style. And the automated type setting lays things out, analyzes the HTML, combines that with CSS, using the Page.js rendering engine, which none of that stuff you have to worry about. You offer your content through the planner and into the editor and choose a template and see which design works best for your book, and then you can choose which one you want to use to actually print out your book.
So these are just the PDF templates. There are EPUB templates as well that admittedly aren't as beautiful as a PDF template. Something we're also interested in is matching the PDF templates to EPUB templates as well. So you could have the same design or quite similar at least because not as much as possible in EPUB, but have the same design in your EPUB as well at least to represent the character of the design you've chosen.
Karen: Great, thank you Christina. We have a few questions, and if we don't get to all of them I will put my email address in the chat so that we can continue the conversation. Speaking of EPUBS, Corey asked if the EPUB export is a reflowable EPUB. And if so, where the sidebars appear, are they anchored so they appear along with the related content?
Christina: So I believe that it's a reflowable EPUB so that depending on the size of your EPUB reader or the size of the window within which you're using an EPUB reader, the content simply reflows and we haven't got as complex design elements there. So if you created a short box in the edit, that will still be a short box, but we don't have these exact templates. Here for example, we have sidebar elements, so these sidebar elements appear in the main flow of text in the exact position they were placed in the editor when putting them into EPUB export. And I imagine if we did adapt these PDF templates for EPUB as well. So we do have two EPUB templates available, but for example, if we tried to match this exact PDF template for EPUB, we would likely put this in the main text.
But I'm the project manager at Ketida so I'm always interested to hear what our Page.js gurus at Coko and our external designers and those who are really interested in print media, who know a lot more than I do about developing for print media, what they have to say about that. And they do love a challenge, so we'll see if sidebar elements, they get into EPUB or if they just get into the main text.
Karen: And then back to Paul, I think we may have addressed your question. Paul asked, "If it's possible to have a book whose layout and organization can be customized for a specific purpose. For example, I have a linear algebra primer that I use for several classes, but I use different sections and modify the order a little depending on the class. Or I think the open intro stats project has three different layouts for the same content depending on the focus of a class." So you could use some of the different templates that Christina showed. I'm not sure if there's anything more that may address that particular question. Let me know Paul if you have more on your mind about that. And then Cindy asks about accessibility. Can you speak briefly to accessibility features?
Christina: Yeah, that's a really great question. So in designing these templates, with automated type setting it's easy to frame it as in you don't need a designer to go back and forth and make changes to your PDF. But as Karen mentioned, design is so important not just because of the beauty and the enriching experience of engaging with a book, but also for things like accessibility. So we made sure in the initial designs that the color palettes used were WCAG 2.1 AA compliant so that there is a high enough contrast between the colors used for text and shading and headings and all of that stuff. So that when they're printed at their page size, that they are accessible to that standard. And then of course, the images aren't generated by Ketida, so that's really important if you are working with something like graphs to have them be accessible. I can't speak to accessibility of these graphs in particular, but there are certain suggestions around how you can make images more accessible in general.
And then things like alt text as I mentioned, screen readers can read the alt text behind an image in a PDF or EPUB if you have included those in the editor. Above your caption there's a section for alt text. If there's anything else in particular about accessibility you have in mind, do let us know.
Karen: Great. And with a minute left, I think we may actually cover all of the questions. Amy asked if there was a two column layout in the template so far. I'm not sure if there is, but there could certainly be one in the pipeline.
Christina: So that hasn't been something we planned for or worked on yet. We do have two column designs for certain things like the chapter review that I demoed in one of the templates earlier, but it's totally possible to create a two column layout in Page.js templates. So if that's something that people want, we'd be really interested in that feedback. And this is all the kind of stuff we are hoping will come from the OEN pilot to get some really valuable feedback on how these templates are working for people, how Ketida and in particular the open textbook planner is helping people to structure and author and export their content. So really looking forward to that, and I think we'll get some really valuable feedback there.
Karen: Thanks so much for bringing that up to Christina. That's absolutely right, these are all of the kind of requests that we want to hear from you. A web book is not one of the outputs via Ketida. Correct me if I'm wrong Christina, the emphasis is on the three format types she shared at the beginning, and so you would need an institutional repository or some other location to keep the files. If this is an obstacle, please let me know. We are at the end of the hour, so if you're looking at the pilot documentation and you have any questions about it or if you think of more questions about Ketida and the open textbook planner, once our time has concluded don't hesitate to reach out. I just put my email there in the chat. It's K-L-A-U- R-I-T-S@U-M-N.edu. Really excited to start collaborating and working with as many of you as is possible on continuing to develop these tools. Please join me in thanking Christina for her excellent and thorough demo. Really appreciate all of your expertise on these tools and look forward to moving forward. So thanks everybody and see you again soon.
Christina: Great, thank you so much Karen. And just on the last note about the web book, we are always seeing how we can extend Ketida and we have discussions in the works at the moment of how we can integrate to have web exports of books in Ketida as well. There's a lot in the pipeline and all of that pilot feedback for the most wanted features will be really useful. Thanks so much everyone for joining, and do check out that pilot documentation if you're interested.
Karen: Thanks again everyone. See you soon.
END OF VIDEO
Chat Transcript
00:29:52 Karen Lauritsen: Ketida & Open Textbook Planner Pilot Info: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SQ37bZluSVc8KSOGBhj1bZ26ROxuf5nmKeJa6C83G24/edit?pli=1#heading=h.6p1xtqlhtdac
00:30:09 Jonathan Poritz: Numbering is by hand, as in the section titles you cut-and-pasted?
00:30:19 Amy Hofer: Regarding copy/pasting outline elements, will there be a tool to import if a book is starting from a known outline? eg outline is in a different format (google doc) or book is based on previously published OER?
00:33:42 Jonathan Poritz: Is that menu of pedagogical elements fixed? What if there is an element I want to use but it isn't listed?
00:36:13 Kristen Kull: Where would you put in questions and answers?
00:37:37 Amy Hofer: Thanks
00:37:45 Richard Saunders: 1) Is the Ketida pilot limited to textbooks or is open scholarship sustained as well? 2) will the text wrap images/elements on page output, or does it display only inline?
00:40:14 Regina Seguin: What will be the timeline of the Ketida pilot? Does the book need to be completed during the pilot or is the pilot only for book planning?
00:40:40 Karen Lauritsen: Ketida User Guide: https://ketida.community/docs/
00:41:58 Karen Lauritsen: Regina, the pilot is through December 2025, when we would hope to have a completed book from pilot participants. There’s a timeline overview included in the documentation as well: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SQ37bZluSVc8KSOGBhj1bZ26ROxuf5nmKeJa6C83G24/edit?pli=1#heading=h.6p1xtqlhtdac
00:43:04 Karen Lauritsen: Paul, here’s info on how math is handled, from the Ketida User Guide. Happy to chat more about it during the session, too: https://ketida.community/docs/13/Math-tables-and-code/
00:46:09 Amy Hofer: WOW!
00:46:44 Amy Hofer: The collaborative elements are exciting!
00:46:54 Karen Lauritsen: 🙂
00:50:15 Cheryl Casey: Can image captions incorporate links for CC's TASL format for attribution?
00:51:04 Amy Hofer: Is this view where authors will compose? If so can the text pane width be adjusted?
00:51:46 Cheryl Casey: As authors/editors work, are changes autosaved?
00:52:07 Amy Hofer: I’m asking bc there is a lot of white space on the right hand side
00:52:43 Ellen Dubinsky: Can you switch to code (HTML) view briefly to show how some of these elements are tagged?
00:53:04 Corey Parson: Is there a possibility to see previous iterations or versions? Example: during editing, a sentence was accidentally deleted and saved. Can we access a previous save?
00:53:33 Jonathan Poritz: Related to @Ellen's question: what is the format "under the hood" -- is it HTML or something else?
00:59:49 Cindy Gruwell: Are there any ADA elements included
01:02:45 Corey Parson: Can we create our own templates?
01:04:37 Cindy Gruwell: Where will the books "live" when completed
01:07:58 Corey Parson: Is the epub export a reflowable epub? If so, where do the sidebars appear? Are they anchored so they appear along with the related content?
01:08:42 Amy Hofer: We’re working on a new Pressbooks theme that will provide two-column layout for 8.5x11 pages so that people don’t have to read across the entire page. Is that an option or in the pipeline for these exports?
01:09:39 Kristen Kull: Will you send a capture of all the links from the chat?
01:10:12 Karen Lauritsen: Kristen, yes, I’ll followup with the video and transcripts from today.
01:10:28 Kristen Kull: Thank you.
01:12:01 Karen Lauritsen: Cindy, the files can live wherever the author/publisher would like to make them available. For example, in an institutional repository. Even a Google Drive. If this is an obstacle, let me know.
01:12:46 Karen Lauritsen: Amy, I’ll share your template idea!
01:13:08 Amy Hofer: Thank you!
01:14:00 Amy Hofer: Karen your reply to Cindy makes me wonder whether a web book is one of the outputs via this platform?
01:14:08 Amy Hofer: OK thanks.
01:14:38 Karen Lauritsen: klaurits@umn.edu
01:14:52 Amy Hofer: This is wonderful work, thank you to everyone who participated in development!
01:15:05 Nicole LaMoreaux: Thank you, both. Have a good afternoon, all.
01:15:10 Regina Seguin: Thank you!
01:15:10 Jonathan Poritz: Thanks for a wonderful, informative presentation!
01:15:18 Cheryl Casey: Thank you!
01:15:19 Corey Parson: Thank you!
01:15:25 Kristen Kull: Thank you
01:15:31 Pam Wissman: Thanks!
01:15:48 Regina Hierholzer: Thank you. Very informative. nice open source program
00:30:09 Jonathan Poritz: Numbering is by hand, as in the section titles you cut-and-pasted?
00:30:19 Amy Hofer: Regarding copy/pasting outline elements, will there be a tool to import if a book is starting from a known outline? eg outline is in a different format (google doc) or book is based on previously published OER?
00:33:42 Jonathan Poritz: Is that menu of pedagogical elements fixed? What if there is an element I want to use but it isn't listed?
00:36:13 Kristen Kull: Where would you put in questions and answers?
00:37:37 Amy Hofer: Thanks
00:37:45 Richard Saunders: 1) Is the Ketida pilot limited to textbooks or is open scholarship sustained as well? 2) will the text wrap images/elements on page output, or does it display only inline?
00:40:14 Regina Seguin: What will be the timeline of the Ketida pilot? Does the book need to be completed during the pilot or is the pilot only for book planning?
00:40:40 Karen Lauritsen: Ketida User Guide: https://ketida.community/docs/
00:41:58 Karen Lauritsen: Regina, the pilot is through December 2025, when we would hope to have a completed book from pilot participants. There’s a timeline overview included in the documentation as well: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SQ37bZluSVc8KSOGBhj1bZ26ROxuf5nmKeJa6C83G24/edit?pli=1#heading=h.6p1xtqlhtdac
00:43:04 Karen Lauritsen: Paul, here’s info on how math is handled, from the Ketida User Guide. Happy to chat more about it during the session, too: https://ketida.community/docs/13/Math-tables-and-code/
00:46:09 Amy Hofer: WOW!
00:46:44 Amy Hofer: The collaborative elements are exciting!
00:46:54 Karen Lauritsen: 🙂
00:50:15 Cheryl Casey: Can image captions incorporate links for CC's TASL format for attribution?
00:51:04 Amy Hofer: Is this view where authors will compose? If so can the text pane width be adjusted?
00:51:46 Cheryl Casey: As authors/editors work, are changes autosaved?
00:52:07 Amy Hofer: I’m asking bc there is a lot of white space on the right hand side
00:52:43 Ellen Dubinsky: Can you switch to code (HTML) view briefly to show how some of these elements are tagged?
00:53:04 Corey Parson: Is there a possibility to see previous iterations or versions? Example: during editing, a sentence was accidentally deleted and saved. Can we access a previous save?
00:53:33 Jonathan Poritz: Related to @Ellen's question: what is the format "under the hood" -- is it HTML or something else?
00:59:49 Cindy Gruwell: Are there any ADA elements included
01:02:45 Corey Parson: Can we create our own templates?
01:04:37 Cindy Gruwell: Where will the books "live" when completed
01:07:58 Corey Parson: Is the epub export a reflowable epub? If so, where do the sidebars appear? Are they anchored so they appear along with the related content?
01:08:42 Amy Hofer: We’re working on a new Pressbooks theme that will provide two-column layout for 8.5x11 pages so that people don’t have to read across the entire page. Is that an option or in the pipeline for these exports?
01:09:39 Kristen Kull: Will you send a capture of all the links from the chat?
01:10:12 Karen Lauritsen: Kristen, yes, I’ll followup with the video and transcripts from today.
01:10:28 Kristen Kull: Thank you.
01:12:01 Karen Lauritsen: Cindy, the files can live wherever the author/publisher would like to make them available. For example, in an institutional repository. Even a Google Drive. If this is an obstacle, let me know.
01:12:46 Karen Lauritsen: Amy, I’ll share your template idea!
01:13:08 Amy Hofer: Thank you!
01:14:00 Amy Hofer: Karen your reply to Cindy makes me wonder whether a web book is one of the outputs via this platform?
01:14:08 Amy Hofer: OK thanks.
01:14:38 Karen Lauritsen: klaurits@umn.edu
01:14:52 Amy Hofer: This is wonderful work, thank you to everyone who participated in development!
01:15:05 Nicole LaMoreaux: Thank you, both. Have a good afternoon, all.
01:15:10 Regina Seguin: Thank you!
01:15:10 Jonathan Poritz: Thanks for a wonderful, informative presentation!
01:15:18 Cheryl Casey: Thank you!
01:15:19 Corey Parson: Thank you!
01:15:25 Kristen Kull: Thank you
01:15:31 Pam Wissman: Thanks!
01:15:48 Regina Hierholzer: Thank you. Very informative. nice open source program
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