At Officina, we’ve thought long and hard about the problems of editing and layout. Both began as practical issues. In editing, these were things like – how do you speed up the conversion between US and UK English? Or make the indexing process less intractable? Or globally update preferred place names? In layout, the popularity of ebooks made this even more urgent – how do you convert a book from a print version, created in something like InDesign, into an ePub version (a slimmed-down form of the html/css web language) without starting again from scratch? Easy enough with a novel; horribly time-consuming for anything with a complex layout. The solutions we have come up with have proved to be on the complicated side. For now, they have the names SmarterText (a text annotation system) and StyleCheet (a format-agnostic page description language). Side note: the ‘smarter’ part of SmarterText is an acronym – or more accurately, what is known as a ‘backronym’ – and stands for ‘Semantic Markup As Resource To Enable Reuse’).

More about these in upcoming posts…