 And what we're going to talk about today is something called the Labor Graphics Magazine Archive because in 2016 we ceased publication of the magazine, which I'll tell you a tiny bit more about in a moment, and two years later we decided that we wanted to actually make it live again without restarting the project. So I'm going to do something that I almost never ever ever do, which is read a pre-prepared presentation. Those of you who know me will know that what I normally do is just turn up and talk nonsense in front of some slides. So I'll be doing the opposite. I don't really have any exciting slides and I have a pre-prepared thing. And then after that I'll hand over to Anna and Ricardo who will talk about what it was like to make the archive. But what I'm going to do now is read you something called One More Time, which is the editor's letter that accompanies the Libra Graphics Magazine Archive, which we are launching imminently. So in five years of editing Libra Graphics Magazine, I wrote eight editor's notes. They all took a broadly similar form. They introduced the theme of the issue, explained why that theme mattered, provided a brief highlight of what to expect in the issue, and tried to put a little provocation in at the end to get the reader geared up for the following pages. For the sake of tradition, this one is going to be very similar. For five years between 2010 and 2015, we made Libra Graphics Magazine. Every issue, all eight of them, contained writing, images, ideas we found worthwhile, thought-provoking, that showed off what free Libra and open source software, design, art, and culture could do and be. We wanted to not only document what was already happening, but also to inform what might. It was important for it to be a print magazine, because we were graphic designers who had been trained to love print, to love paper, to love the feel of a magazine, and the ability to pick it up, flip through it, tear out a page, leave it on a coffee table, hand it to a friend. It was a magazine not just for the eyes, but for the hands. There's a romance to that, and we were invested in it. Eventually, we stopped. More on that in Coming Home After an Absence, which you'll find elsewhere in the archive. But with the help of a large and ever-changing group of contributors, we left behind eight wonderful issues of a magazine that made us very proud. The aim of this archive is to, for the first time, collect everything in one place, online, in a more accessible, more linkable, more portable format. One of the things that mattered most about the magazine during its run was that it was designed to be a print publication above all else. This archive is an answer to a question we've had since the magazine's inception. What does that print-first magazine look like when it really attends to the needs of a digital format? My two co-editors, Anna and Ricardo, have some thoughts on that in their production call-a-phone, which also you'll find in the archive. When the three of us conceived of this archive, we also wanted it to include some new work. Because we're now a couple of years distant from the magazine's original run, we wanted to look back, not just at what happened between 2010 and 2015, but to also see where things have moved since. In that spirit, in addition to the entire contents of the LibraGraphics magazine 2010 to 2015, we have a small selection of new work from people who have made valued and valuable contributions to our LibraGraphics landscape in the last eight years. We have an article from Chalien Desweff about the state of the ecosystem reflecting on our place in the broader design world. From Larissa Blasek, we have some thoughts on how young designers are currently being educated and how that education could be different. We have the usual production call-a-phone from Anna and Ricardo, but with some extra reflection. We have a piece from the three of us, reflecting on five years, our one serious bit of reminiscence. They don't actually know that we've written that. They need to look at it before it gets published, because mostly I've done that. I digress. And finally, we have a series of slightly facetious questions, that a collection of interesting artists, designers, practitioners, researchers, and to quote Chalien Desweff, thinkers have answered for us about their experiences of and hopes for floss in art and design. What we want with all of this is to see LibraGraphics magazine live a little more, even though its publication run has ended. And I think it does live. Archives, because they preserve the collections they contain, help those collections live. Instead of being lost, or at the very least locked away in PDFs, we're both pleased and proud that the works that made up LibraGraphics magazine in its original run between 2010 and 2015, will now get a second life. And I will now hand you over to Anand Riccardo, who will talk about how that second life works. So now we'll be switching to a more practical aspect of how this print-lizing archive come to be. So as Ginger said, our magazine's main focus was print. And the biggest feature request we always had over the years was, why don't you make an online version of the magazine? And that was something that we've been wanting to do, like Ginger said, from day one. But the problem is, we would produce first in Scribbles, Scribbles interface, and that was not easily portable to the web, at least when we started in 2010. And even now, when we decide, okay, let's go with this, this is what we thought would be the way to elevate the magazine to its rightful resting place, which would be online for everyone to read. And we'd like to present, talk a bit about what the process is. So the first thing that we settled on was, we have to convert the Scribbles files into something that's web-friendly. And why the Scribbles files? In fact, we use text files a lot between us in production, but the last minute edits only ended up in Scribbles. So we only had the Scribbles documents as the true source. And how do we get stuff away from there? We did, well, and I apologize in advance to all the Scribbles people in the room, but we actually made a small-scale XML parser to extract the text from the Scribbles files, because this is an example of such a file. You can see there's iText nodes halfway, and that's where the text lives. And then there's this attribute C parent, which is the style. So we made a script that is also made available in the archive repository, which we'll point to at the end. That kind of gets all these and tries to assign, okay, this is a heading, this is an italic, and so on. It's really not that good of a conversion script, by the way, because it flips the pages, and we had to do a lot of manual editing after that. And, of course, there's the programmer's vision of automating everything. That's usually the case, but that's, in our experience, that's most often, actually, never the case. So after all this automation, we had to do a lot of manual reviewing. Then we had to gather all the images from the Scribbles text files, like searching the text for those images and getting the references. But because now we were working in the realm of plain text, namely markdown, which this is kind of a new format that we got, we could use more easy, well, at least for us, easy to use command line tools to process the text, like tag images to find glitches in the text, to tag good notes, and so on. Another great thing, so now that we had all the articles in text format, and after editing them manually, we could add some metadata. You can see on the top of that, you have a title, semicolon and the name, and the author and the section. And this is markdown metadata. Why is this useful? Usually, in recent years, you would consider a kind of CMS for this kind of content. Like every article would be, you could add like a WordPress custom installation for this. But we wanted to try the last big thing, which I think will also be a thing here at the LGM, going to be talked about, which is static sites generators, which you might have heard of. Usually, in our case, we used something called Pelican that gets markdown files and reads the metadata and builds the website from that. So we could add like another metadata type, which was tags, but then we could tag articles with. Again, so in our documentation, you're going to find quite a few things recipes for every single operation that we needed to do, like resize images, redownload the images from our repositories, turn images into image links. This is all in the read we found repository. So starting from the text files, now we have all the magazine articles in text format, and we can build it into a website using this wonderful, wonderful Python library, which is called Pelican, to make, actually, build the website itself. So this is the repository for the archive, and what we have is a folder per issue, and inside that folder, we have all the articles that were in that issue. And we're organizing them by the page number. So it's a much more cleaner structure and easier way to find things in the, well, in all these eight issues that we published. And this is the site that Pelican generates. So this is the home page. We are now only have the eight issues that we published. We will now have another new issue with the new texts that we are working on. And you can browse the issue, you can browse the archive by issue, by author, or by tag. We are working on these ways to organize the articles that can be interesting and different from the print object that we had before. This is the issue page. And so what we're doing is we're using the categories in Pelican for the issues, and we're using the tags for the themes. So in each category you'll see all the articles. This is a page of one of the articles, and we were working on the theme in a way that would make it look like an archive because Pelican is a tool that's built for making blogs. So it's not, you don't have this out of the box. We built on top of it so that it would work for what we wanted. So when you are reading an article, you can go back and forward in the articles in that issue. And then on the bottom of the article you can see all the other articles in the same issue. But you can also see all other articles in the same section. So in this case, dispatch. Then we added links to the PDF if you want. You can click and go directly to the magazine PDF. And you can go to the source markdown file, which we hope has a lot of use. So in the authors we put together everyone that's contributed to the magazine and you can look for the articles by their authors and you can see which sections they are on. The tags also work the same way. And it will be published, well it's already online, but we will announce it maybe next week. Yeah, once I've written the press release we'll announce it. And also actually I'll just say because I'm terrible and a bit of a librarian, once we've come up with the right schema for organizing the tags then we'll be much happier. Yeah, feel free to visit it. There is the source archive in the box. If you feel it's picking you with us and you want to file an issue please do. If you don't want to, that's fine as well. All the archives are accessible right now. Here are the dragons, but we thought it would be a privilege to just put it out already and fix the things. In the meantime I think we have an extra 10 minutes for Q&A. Does anyone have any cues for us to A? Is that a hint? Do we have a mic? Does anyone want to? Here, I'll give you that. I think you need to turn it off. It's available for other people to extract XML from files. Extract text from XML? Okay, for the stream. So the question was if the tool allows you to, if there is available the tool to extract text from XML. The tool is available if you go to the repository. I can check. It is on the, on the screen. On the archive repository and I'll show you exactly where. The thing is it's very limited. So I might as well tell you. So it's in here. Scripts and script is extract. The instructions are inside. They're not super complete, but this will work to take out text. But it's not, again it's not bullet proof. We had to review and we found some parts that it did not extract the full content, but it worked for 95%. But again, yeah, it's a bit buggy. It will give you the text boxes out of order. You have to reorder them manually. And I suppose that if you're interested in getting stuff out of script, the script developers in the LGM will have a much cleaner solution to extract stuff. There's another hand over there. I think I can just shout. Yeah, I'll repeat the question. There are some, there are some XSLT scripts floating around to take straight, screenless output and convert it to text or HTML or whatever. And that, that will likely get things in the right order. So you might want to look for those. Okay, so there is a few XSLT files that, around, that will help you. It's only natural that only now we hear that there's a much simpler solution. Of course, such as a hacker's license. I asked people for Scribus XSLT and I thought, like, 14% result. How much more than 200? So it's a, searching for Scribus XSLT will lead you the right way, apparently. The question was a bit like, have you thought about implementing Scribus importer in Pandoc? Pandoc? Okay, so the question was, thinking of implementing Scribus importer in Pandoc. This was really a hack. And we're far from, we're Scribus users and not developers. So it's really out of our league to implement a plugin for conversion. This was really something that we did for this. And then we ran away from it as fast as we could and we had our way around it. But again, I think there's quite a few, the people to ask about this are in this room for sure. It's just not us. Yep, you in the back. So now you extracted the truth from the layout into Markdown. And maybe that could also change your workflow for the future. So is there a plan, how you bring back the Markdowns to the Scribus or how you link them together? I also think there is a problem when you have layout specific stuff, like, I have a violation and stuff like that. Okay, so the question was how it would be possible and how could it work to bring Markdown back into Scribus? Again, as you remark, we're really just not the most proficient Scribus hackers. We tried back in the day, like a few years ago, but we ran into a few issues back then with the Scribus script interface and we kind of dropped that. Not that I think through any kind of lack of features in Scribus, just that back then we could not manage and we stayed with the manual workflow. Since we're in this kind of project, we're doing a lot of manual work already. So you kind of do that already. So instead of going and trying to make this Markdown to Scribus, although I remember in past LGMs hearing stuff about coming up with this kind of Markdown to Scribus workflow. So again, actually I see Halle raising his hand. That's one of the guys you should ask. So if you want, if somebody with guidance here is interested in that, can talk to me now. There are plans. And there is code. There we go. Anyone else? Yeah, Brendan. So now you have this nice infrastructure to produce. In theory you could. If somebody gave me some good articles, you could actually make another, like a strictly web version. Theoretically. Oh no, you're not getting us like that. We have not foreclosed on the idea of doing other things at some point in the future. I want a book, to be honest. That's what's on my mind. I wanted to be a book because paper is nice. But this was something that we've been thinking about for eight years. And that's, I think, to me that's why it exists. Because we've wanted it for so long. And it never happened because we were so busy doing all of the other overhead things. Like, I mean, yes, you hand me a lovely article and I'm delighted. But I am an editor. I still have to edit it, you know. Unfortunately, because people's grammatical mistakes don't fix themselves. And one of the things that we always tried very hard to do was keep an exceptionally high standard for everything we did. Which I think for the most part we achieved. There's a blue box with rounded corners that haunts me from 2010. But, yeah. But yes, so the answer is theoretically, yes, this gives us a platform to do things. But I don't think, I don't think it means suddenly getting the band back together for an online magazine. Unless. Yeah, I mean, it's not, there's no impossibles here. But the, well, the plan for this was actually really to entomb the magazine in a dignified way, much more than just PBS. I mean, but of course, let's, if there's any determination, of course, let's talk about it. We really enjoyed doing this. We would enjoy picking up something at the mic, so we can think of something. If anyone wants to come to us and talk about it. All right, is that all? Does anyone else have any burning questions? Yeah. No one's buzzing. Someone does on Twitter. I guess that's it, right? We can say thank you for listening to our waffle about magazines. Thank you. Thank you.