ePub Publisher

• Joshua Marks

several weeks

The tool proposed here is to provide a shell to publish ePub archives that work on mobile devices. The objective is to export assemblies of pages within an ePub book that can be enjoyed offline on devices following identified profiles.

In particular the XWiki Collaborative Learning Assets Management System, an OER sharing platform in use by several projects, supports the assembly of learning resources of diverse origins and types by a concept of collections which encourages re-usability. This project should enhance this re-usability by an export feature that allows the content of a collection to be exported as e-book.

The software should support the author in predicting and verifying the playability of the content on various devices (e.g. warning that a Flash file is not going to work on the profile Aldiko on Android). It should also leverage open-source softwares such as Swify, ImageMagick, of ffmpeg to ensure an embedding that is reasonable in size and that works in typical mobile devices. An environment for prototyping the delivered ePub is central to this work. The delivery is likely to base on the recently launched Curriki Geometry tablet oriented interface.

The Curriki and Planète Sankoré teams, together with the trainee, will support this choice in suggesting environments in wide use in their target population where this can be tested in the timeframe of the project (schools in the US, India, France, and the French speaking Africa).

A very successful contribution would include code that we can deploy to any XCLAMS installation. It should, with a small amount of changes, allow developers to also export to other package formats such as SCORM or Common Cartridge and maybe even deliver Android's APK applications.

Mentors: the XCLAMS community, including Paul Libbrecht and Bob Greenawalt (confirmed), as well as Joshua Marks, Ludovic Dubost and Flavius Olaru.

Discussion: is to happen on the XCLAMS and xwiki-devs mailing-lists as well as on the #xclams and #xwiki IRC channels.

Delivery: open-source code (LGPL) using Groovy, Velocity, Unix command-line-tools, that can be made part of the XCLAMS core code.

• HTML
• web development (JS, CSS)
• readiness to learn XWiki objects, the Java Platform, Groovy, and Velocity
• Unix command-line tools (on Linux and Solaris) a plus
• experience with mobile development a plus

2014

Proposed