From paper to pixels and back again - Objavi links solutions for publishers
The basics of Objavi-widening the possibilities of publishing
Objavi is a platform for exporting (rendering) content into a book format -- for digital, print, ebook readers and for online reading. The idea behind Booktype and Objavi is to support as many different types of output formats as possible and have the ability to create high quality outcomes for each from a single source document.
Objavi started out as a part of the Booktype project, where it's role was making PDFs and EPUBs from books created inside the Booktype editor.
New roles and tasks as publishing moves to the browser
With the coming of books in a browser -- a new paradigm where the browser is turned into a complete typesetting environment for creating books -- Objavi's role is augmented with the task of supporting the front-end user with the ability to quickly and efficiently create print-quality renderings of the whole document or its individual chapters in a number of different formats, page sizes, fonts etc.
For creating print-quality PDFs, we are in a final stage of switching to a new rendering engine that is based on pure WebKit and uses our very own BookJS project. WebKit is a well-known web page rendering engine that is used inside Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome web browsers. WebKit is also an open-source project, a very important feature for us as it allowed us to stay on the bleeding edge of development and use new and experimental features as they emerged.
BookJS is a JavaScript library that reflows a web page into a fixed-page format and in effect turns a web page into a book ready for printing. This approach uses WebKit's own layout engine and offers a much simpler and cleaner solution than the one we used so far. This new rendering engine will allow for higher quality outputs that look 100% like how the user sees them while editing the book in the browser.
Working towards agile Objavi
We are also working on a more agile Objavi that can be used by a number of different clients, each with disparate requirements but having the same goal -- creating book quality publications. One example of these users would be a content management system that needs the ability to create hard-copies of published content. Another would be a digital news archive that offers print-on-demand service of the archived articles.
As well a new API is in the works that will offer Objavi's functionality to various projects that in some way or another require print-quality output. Stay tuned for more updates as these developments progress.