Cross-media publishing with MediaWiki

Method: Hybrid publishing workflow utilizing MediaWiki, Jinja templating, Pagedjs for the layout.
Result: The Wiki2Pdf2web workflow yielded in the intended result of 3 publications, 2 of which finalized, 1 in the making.

H&D developed several cross-media publications in 2021-2023 using a web-to-print workflow further referred to as Wiki2Pdf or Wiki2Pdf2Web. The first publication was a book published by Valiz titled "Making Matters. A Vocabulary of Collective Arts". The second publication was self-published by H&D and titled "First, Then...Repeat. Workshop scripts in practice". With every publication the technical infrastructure, editing and design workflow were further developed. The design of both publications accommodated non-linear reading. Cross-references indicate connections across chapters, themes, methods and timelines.

While the first publishing process put more emphasis on the printable output, the second iteration treated on and offline output equally.

The hybrid publishing process utilized MediaWiki (installed on H&D's server) as a central publishing and content management infrastructure, where the content (text, images, video) can be gathered and edited. In the case of the 2nd publication the two outputs: 1. printable pdf rendered in the browser ( https://wiki2print.hackersanddesigners.nl/pdf/FiguringThingsOutTogether ), and 2. the front end website ( https://firstthenrepeat.hackersanddesigners.nl/#A_Note_on_the_design_of_this_publication ) pull from the same source ( https://wiki2print.hackersanddesigners.nl/wiki/Publishing:FiguringThingsOutTogether ).

Following open-source principles, the tool ecosystem that evolved around the design of this publication is documented and published on the H&D website and git repository under the CC4r license, providing the possibility of continuation in other contexts, studying, critiquing, and repurposing.

All typefaces used in this publication are available at ‘Badass Libre Fonts By Womxn’, a repository of open source and/or libre typefaces composed by Loraine Furter and Velvetyne Libre and Open Source Type Foundry.