Children book in multiple languages: Ada & Zangemann - A Tale of Software, ...

[a.l.e]

Today I was watching

https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-let-s-spark-children-s-interest-in-coding

and, at the end of the talk, I got "forwarded" to

Ada & Zangemann - A Tale of Software, Skateboards, and Raspberry Ice Cream



A book about kids and programming.

While looking for the book, I've discovered that it's done with Scribus, produced in multiple languages.

The result is pretty and worth to have a look:

https://archive.org/details/ada-zangemann/

I've not yet read it, but I stumbled on their git repository

https://git.fsfe.org/FSFE/ada-zangemann

and it contains all the resources to create the book:

• the Scribus templates
• the images
• the scripts to fill the Scribus files and produce the PDFs for print and for viewing.

In my eyes, this is a good starting point for people who want to use Scribus to create a book that is translated in multiple languages and automatically fill the content out of text files.

While looking at the files, I've noticed a few things:

• They are not using the Scribus drop caps, but are inserting them from images (they did not find the drop caps or Scribus is not implementing them in a fitting way?).
• They are not using the Python scripting inside of Scribus (except for simple code for producing the PDF from the finished .sla), but longer Perl and Shell scripts.
• They are putting the text into the .sla by modifying the raw .sla XML in a Perl script, rather than loading the text
• They are not using the page numbers (and they are not using master pages).
• No text formatting (the script removes the formatting) and the text is kept left aligned (a choice that makes handling multiple translations much easier and with all the fancy graphics it's probably a good choice).
• For some reason, they are creating one template per language, instead of filling the same .sla (template) with each language.

All in all: they made good choices and they managed to create a workflow that is simple to follow and adapt.

But, I have to admit that, now, I'm tempted to write a Python script that runs inside of Scribus, make it more general to be used also for other books and fill tickets for all the feature that are missing (as an example for the drop caps, if they cannot do what is needed for this book!)

[MrB]

That's cool

[utnik]

yes, it's really cool. but the strange thing is, that the downloadable .pdf on 'archive.org' was generated by indesign 17.3.

utnik