 Okay, hi, I'm Nate In the program it suggests that that Vern is talking in this session, too, which he's not that was a mix-up on my part. He was at the The sprint that I'm gonna be talking about though But you just heard him talk so here's from now it'll all blur together You won't know Although he is from Southern California, I don't know why he was putting on a fake British accent for his whole session Anyway, the the title for my talk is how he wrote a font-forged manual in three days, which After I saw it I realized I don't really like that title because I'm gonna talk about a book sprint that Some font-forged volunteers went to and it came up with a national printed book But the how is not really the interesting parts. I mean it involves some software But really what is probably more interesting to everyone else is the lessons that I think we learned from that about documentation and maybe some about font-forged itself and There there may be applications so that for other projects I would definitely encourage other projects to look at doing a book sprints and participating in one And I'm gonna talk about things that you can learn from that that are That stem from it being a book as opposed to a web Documentation projects and also the fact that it's a sprints affects things too When I say we in this this project that involves Vernon who is just up here Ben Martin whom you have seen many times this podium already Evan Sorkin who is a designer Jason Pigaro who's a designer and myself and When we got to the book sprint, we were also joined by Molly Sharp who did not come with us But who works for Safari books online and happened to be there and was a good fit for what we were doing because she works in publishing and Is an editor? On this list Vernon and Evan are both like trained professional type designers Jason is I guess you say a part-time type designer, but he Has also been doing it for a long time and he knows the font-forged tools really well including Quite a few that I don't know at all Ben is one of those few people who has actually looked into the abyss of the source code of font fortune come out the other side So he brought a technical angle to that. I'm sort of an amateur font designer, but I am also a Tech journalist and I've been writing several thousand words a week about free software for years and years So that comes in handy when you're writing a book to have some people who do that That writing stuff and I would also add that in that group I may have suggested that Vernon and Evan were sort of the same They're both trained designers, but they have very different perspectives and having a group with different perspective helps a lot So Vernon if you look on the font forge users list He answers questions from other people constantly and is very active on the bug tracker and stuff Evan is not as experienced with font forge, I guess in particular But he also he's sort of a theorist and every topic they come up. He like well we don't want to talk about bold we want to talk about weight in general and So it was interesting the two of them have also have also lectured a lot about about type design so the The notion that we would be able to instruct people on how to do it sort of comes from Four or five different angles in just those five or six people But the other thing is that all of us were just sort of volunteers the project Google hosts, it's called summer of code doc camp and They sort of put out a call for any project who would like to come and spend a week Writing a book and We sort of got who was available and that doesn't mean that it was the b-list or anything But if it had been at a different time of year, it would have been different people who had been free And if it had been a different place, it might have been different people. So you get a Almost an arbitrary mix of different viewpoints, which is an interesting way to write Now that the thing is called summer of code doc camp. It does not take place in summer It's not actually a camp. You're at a hotel and at the Google offices Unfortunately, I don't have pictures of that the very friendly security guards at Google and they're brightly colored clothing or insistent that you don't take pictures of stuff and It was really nice, but there's people just right across the hall working on secret secret projects and cyborgs and stuff The way the camp works, it's one week long five days and there were three projects there fought for just one of the three The Google summer of code office sort of hosted it But it was really facilitated and run by floss manuals, which is a project You may have heard of floss manuals has been around for years and they do a lot of documentation Projects they have a site floss manuals dot-net where anyone can go and start a book It can be a manual in the strictest sense of the term is how to use it and it can be your personal experience on Things you can do with with gimp. They're cool. So there's a lot of variety in that and floss manuals has done some Some sprint events where they'll go and update the documentation for open stack or something to fit the new release but this book sprint thing is kind of a new or Relatively recent Edition where you do an intensive workshop for one week with a team that gathers in one place and doesn't leave until it's done Let's see. Yeah, I just talked about that actually See a floss manuals is concerned with with free software, but it's not exclusive to that I'll get to the software that they actually use and it can be used for writing any kind of book It's not really specific to to open source stuff The three projects that were at the camp and we were there were font forge Evergreen which is an integrated library system and by that I mean it's the software that runs the catalog and knows when stuff is checked out and knows when they need to acquire new stuff and managers accounts and really Really not related to font design all and then eat toys and eat toys, which I think I didn't capitalize correctly is a Programming environment for kids based on the squeak language and so this is three arbitrary projects that have no relation to each other, but the way the camp works we were there for the same five days and Initially, we had an uncomfort today where we split up into groups and wrote on sticky notes and stuck to the wall and stuff like that and then we split into our our three projects and and wrote intensively for three days and produced a book and Initially, we were we were told okay the idea of the unconference you're gonna sit down and talk about what's important to your project and documentation or to the struggles that you have that kind of thing and They told us okay the idea there is that you get thinking about documentation issues, but I think that was a lie I think it was just to freak you out and fill you with fear because you realize that everyone faces the same problems in documentation and open source like that keeping it up to dates and getting developers and writers to Speak the same language and and those things so we dealt with some of that and then we split off and started writing at the end of Those five days we had physical books. I held this up This is the font forge book There's a print on the man shop somewhere near mountain view that produced 30 copies of each of the three books Overnight they knew they're gonna do it. So it's not like we walked in with them But that is pretty amazing to see and as you can see in that that small screenshot, which I thought was bigger The software that you use for this process also produces electronic copies. There's an iPad there and a Ink device of some kind and a little phone So what you end up with is not specific to being in print, but that does help The way this front actually works is the first day you get in your group and you decide on the title for your book And there's a lot more writing a title than you think because that determines the subject matter and the scope in a real particular way then you split up you decide what the table of contents is going to be as a group and Rearrange the chapter so that makes sense and then you split up and everybody writes a chapter separately and You look at someone else's chapters, but they're all done simultaneously. That's not how you normally write you normally write You know in order if you're writing a novel you would do it that way Probably And then there's a review process for everyone checks everyone else's stuff, but at some point it's just done The software that you use for this is called book type these days it's managed by source fabric which is a group that produces journalism software It was originally called bookie and I think it was when floss manuals wrote it was called bookie and they just sort of gave it to source fabric to Do more interesting things with this is what it looks like. It's a basic Whizzy wig looking web editor, but it does let you in the book view sort of shuffle and rearrange Chapters and it locks out a chapter when you're reading it So it does stuff behind the scenes or when you're editing it sorry and you can leave notes and stuff So it's it's good at the collaborative Writing process even though it sort of just looks like a text entry field And like I said, it can produce HTML Which is natural and it can produce a PDF that you can print, but it can do lots of other things There's an engine called up Javi Bobby. I'm not sure how it's pronounced. That is actually based on the caliber you reader You read your software and that does all the conversion stuff but Yeah, I am running short on time apparently So What do I want to say? Well, the title determines everything is the first thing that we learned when you look at this This is nine words, but it it restricts a lot of what we say because it's a guide to making type, right? It's not a reference manual. It's start designing with font forge So it's not for people who are of years and years of design experience with font lab or some other application and just settling on that name And crystallizes what you're gonna write and what you're not gonna write in a really specific way Actually already talked about that The sprint format leaves things like worrying about style issues For the very end and you focus on the content and you get the content done There's some pictures of the books Hopefully the book will live on we set up a website designed with font forge calm where someone can Go download or read it and in theory, that's sort of a general purpose URL that other people if they want to write about Surveillance or translate it into another language that will work fine To quickly talk about the the lessons you learned in the book sprint process When you're writing one book and it's gonna be done You have to relearn your own software real quickly You have to look at the point of view of the reader, which is not always the developer And that it can change the way you look at documentation and your code Let's see what I want to I Have more I could talk about the lessons you You learn that the user doesn't see your your application the same way you do they see their workflow And it you will find odd things that you didn't realize were a problem for users because you're having to describe things The way they're done and not the way that you you set them up I want to leave time for questions, so I want to jump to the end I Guess the last thing to think about is that it is a physical book. It's a printed thing And there's something different about that Because at some point it goes to the printer and it's finished and you can't keep altering it and that there's a That realization will hit you at some point in the writing process. It might be at the very last minute, but It's not like a wiki where you can set up a big table of contents and Write a great first chapter and then get busy and never finish it And there are too many open source projects that face that problem where it's easy to get in a distributed fashion and Never finish something but sprinting All together in one place Forces you to finish it so I would encourage your project to take a look at that if you floss manuals or elsewhere