DPUB IG Telco, 2015-06-08: Pagination requirements, scholarly publishing

See minutes online for a more detailed record of the discussions.

Requirements for Pagination

Dave Cramer has put together a first set of items as requirements for pagination. It is only a start. The are some broad categories (margin controls, orientation control, page display, etc.). However, there are lots of steps between this set of requirements and the final development of specs. The point of the document is to get the group's ideas down so that we would have a discussion with the CSS Working Group, also in view of the Houdini project.

Some discussions followed with new requirements coming to the fore. Issues arising included whether we should talk about non-rectangular regions as pages (it was agreed that, at this point, we should stick to rectangular areas); pops, overlays, naming pages (e.g., a title page may look different than the rest), using templates. These should be used to expand the use cases.

A more broader issue was also brought up on the relationships between a basically "declarative" control over pages, much like the current CSS specification, and a more JavaScript API oriented view, which is closer to what the Houdini project is supposed to deliver. It has been recognized that, at present and close future, some level of programming will remain necessary, but the general goal is to try to reduce that as much as possible. The requirements should include a clear statement on that effect.

Scholarly publishing

The general question is whether scholarly publishing is properly addressed in the group's use cases as well as, in general, its work. Tzviya Siegman gave an overview of some of the particularities of scholarly publishing, which was then completed by Bill Kasdorf and Ivan Herman. Some of the particularities cited were

• Scholarly publications are focusing on articles, bound to journal issues or proceedings, but where each individual article is a publication by itself
• The scholarly community has been on-line for a long time; these days the printed versions tend to disappear. The on-line versions are dominated by PDF usage; reasons include tradition, the (false?) requirements of having pixel level control, faithful reproduction of printed journals. With the disappearance of printed journals more and more journals produce articles in HTML, though the downloaded versions are still in PDF. A particular issue is the predominance of 2 column PDF, which is very bad on, say, tablets.
• Different production workflow, with an emphasis on peer review. The internals are based on various XML specifications (e.g., JATS)
• Publication of scientific data become integral part of publications, i.e., should be part of the packaged content, it influences fragment identifier specifications, included JavaScript for visualization, etc.
• Publications routinely include lots of metadata, as part of the content itself, searched and crawled by many different services

Today EPUB is not really part of the picture for scholarly community. It is not clear why; there is an issue of tradition (on line presence of that community is older then the very existence of EPUB), the predominance of PDF, etc. There is also a perception issue: the perception of EPUB is that it is really for books, whereas this is not, technically, true.

It has been agreed that the use cases have to be looked at from the scholarly publishing point of view, and that outreach efforts should be made to include EPUB in their world view...