Day/Time/Room
May 16, 2024 | 1:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. | Ski-U-Mah Room
Title: Automated Typesetting: Making Beautiful Textbooks
Presenter: Dione Mentis, COO and Senior Architect, Coko
Description: Textbooks present unique challenges in balancing pedagogical design, visual appeal, accessibility, portability across devices, and long-term maintainability. Current publishing tools struggle to deliver on all fronts, often achieving one or two goals through manual processes while compromising elsewhere. We need to reimagine solutions.
This presentation reveals an innovative approach to textbook publishing combining Ketty and Paged.js for streamlined creation of standards-driven, visually designed content able to gracefully transition across digital and print mediums.
Ketty offers a browser-based editor where authors can write richly formatted narrative which is stored as structured HTML. Its workflow-centric collaboration features bring instructional designers, subject matter experts and multimedia producers together in real-time to jointly create and refine textbook content.
The structured HTML can then feed into Paged.js – an open source typesetting engine able to renditionally split content into elegant paginated outputs for screen and print. Generated PDFs achieve professional typesetting automatically with optimized reading layouts.
Accessibility is prioritized across the workflow – with structured data supporting transcripts, logical reading order, and semantic enrichment to enable adaptation.
By combining publishing tools purpose-built for openness, customizability and using web standards, this new paradigm lowers overheads, accelerates timelines, and creates textbooks ready for the multi-modal future while retaining quality, aesthetics and device flexibility.
Join us to learn how Ketty and Paged.js can revolutionize textbook publishing through web-based collaboration, automated typesetting, and a structure-first ideology able to dynamically adapt content for the needs of OER.