The Python Papers Edition One

[tleeuwenburg]

Greetings all,

Some of you may have noticed the launch of the Python Journal a while
back. Due to artistic differences, the journal has now been re-launched
as The Python Papers. It is available under a Creative Commons License,
something we felt was appropriate given its nature. Many here commented
that this was important to them, and it is important to us also.

For a fuller description of what we hope the journal to be, I re-create
my inaugural blog posting at the end of this email, or it can be found
online here: http://pythonpapers.cgpublisher.com/diary

Some of you had a number of specific points to raise, which I can now
answer properly since launching under our own banner.

1.) It takes too many clicks to download.
A) We know, but it's like that to save our server. We will be
publishing to a number of online archives, back-issues may be
back-linkable from those.

2.) Is it free?
A) Yes, as in beer and as in freedom. Creative Commons 2.5
Noncommercial, attribution, share-alike.

3.) Can I have an HTML version?
A) No, we like it pretty.

4.) Why not try (insert favourite thing here)
A) We will. Thanks for the fish.

" Volume 1, Edition 1 makes history

Welcome to The Python Papers. This journal, small though it is,
represents the careful efforts of a small group of Python enthusiasts
who are keen to form a better community in which developers may work.

As Editor-In-Chief, my role is manifold, but my goals are to improve
the level of connectedness of Python developers, and in so doing
improve my own developer experience.

The entire editorial board has put time into making this publication
something which will hopefully lead to a buildup of momentum, fuelled
by the enthusiastic involvement of others who find Python as exciting
as we do.

The current issue contains one academic, peer-reviewed article, one
industry article, and a list of events coming up in Melbourne,
Australia. We would like to expand this list significantly. We offer
our services in organising, collating and reviewing submitted content
such that Python developers around the world may participate in the
creation of something bigger than all of us, for the benefit of all of
us. It may be a small journal, a little thing really, but all are
welcome, and we look forward to getting to know our readers through the
written word.

Please download the first edition, and consider both what it is and
what it might be.

For those of you looking to publish an academic paper as a part of
coursework or for interest's sake alone, we can offer a formal review
process which will meet those guidelines while preserving the goals of
freedom of information and community spirit.

Those who are using Python in their work may like to consider using the
journal as a means of expressing successes or frustrations with either
the language itself or specific applications. We may be able to offer
code reviews and style guides, and would be happy to hear about and
help propagate news of what is happening so that everyone can take an
interest.

For those who would like a reliable source of information, The Python
Papers presents a unique and current view into the state of Python at
large.

To all of you, welcome!
Cheers,
-Tennessee (Editor-In-Chief)"

 

[Fuzzyman]

Greetings all,

Some of you may have noticed the launch of the Python Journal a while
back. Due to artistic differences, the journal has now been re-launched
as The Python Papers. It is available under a Creative Commons License,
something we felt was appropriate given its nature. Many here commented
that this was important to them, and it is important to us also.

For a fuller description of what we hope the journal to be, I re-create
my inaugural blog posting at the end of this email, or it can be found
online here: http://pythonpapers.cgpublisher.com/diary

Some of you had a number of specific points to raise, which I can now
answer properly since launching under our own banner.
[snip..]

3.) Can I have an HTML version?
A) No, we like it pretty.

Congratulations - it looks very professional.

*But*, PDF is an abhorrent format unless you expect people to print it.

Your download system almost certainly guarantees that the content won't
be indexed by search engines and so is much less likely t obe found by
people who will find it interesting and useful.



Make sure annnouncements make their way onto PlanetPython (if they're
not already..).

Fuzzyman
http://www.voidspace.org.uk/index2.shtml

 

[tleeuwenburg]

Thanks for the comments. PDF is, to some extent, a requirement. To
preserve the entire journal as a single "entity" with a reasonably high
production quality, there seems to be no way around it. I could not
find a sufficiently simple way to do multi-format publishing with an
attractive layout and good typesetting.

As for the online archives, a number of journal achives will contain
the journal, so hopefully Google will pick those up. However, I take
your point about searching. Having the archives appear under
"pythonpapers.org" would mean that the search results would return a
consistent location, which is probably a good thing.

I will be exploring further options on this front as they are
suggested. I intend to keep PDF as the "primary" format at this stage,
although there is nothing preventing us from pursuing other options
also.

We will also be looking for collaborators and link exchanges to boost
quality and build the community. We would love to help bring together a
people who may be working on individual blogs or websites and perhaps
encourage them to work directly with others. If we can generate enough
high-quality content, I think that is the most important thing.

Convincing people to help up build up might be difficult, but on the
basis that people are currently doing it themselves without assistance,
they might prefer to be given some help in this process -- help in the
form of article editing, an audience, etc.

We have two proposals so far for the next issue, both of high quality,
but it would be great to come out with a bumper issue which would start
grabbing people's attention. Now that we have our ISSN set up, we're a
bona fide journal, but before we start mouthing off, it would be great
to have a more established track record. To do that we need to come up
with a decent shot at our next issue...

Cheers,
-T (Editor-In-Chief)

 

[garylinux]

Tell us about it again when it is available as html. We will be glad to
read it. I am sorry but I almost never find a pdf worth the bother of
clicking on it.
Sorry

 

[Eric_Dexter]

The adobe people have online conversion

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlinetools.html

google seems to convert them when they end up in the engines

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pdf+to+html

has a list of converters

http://www.dexrow.com

 

[Paul Rubin]

Some of you may have noticed the launch of the Python Journal a while
back. Due to artistic differences, the journal has now been re-launched
as The Python Papers. It is available under a Creative Commons License,
something we felt was appropriate given its nature. Many here commented
that this was important to them, and it is important to us also.

But it looks like it's a noncommercial-use-only license, making it
impermissible to re-use the article contents in, say, expanding the
Python documentation.

2.) Is it free?
A) Yes, as in beer and as in freedom. Creative Commons 2.5
Noncommercial, attribution, share-alike.

Free as in beer, certainly yes. However, the noncommercial
restriction prevents it from being free as in freedom, according to
the folks who first drew the distinction:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

You may have paid money to get copies of free software, or you may
have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your
copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software,
even to sell copies.

Free software does not mean non-commercial. A free program must be
available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial
distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer
unusual; such free commercial software is very important.

 

[Tennessee Leeuwenburg]

The interesting thing is, there's nothing in your layout or format that you can't do with some nice standards-compliant HTML and CSS. It could look identical as HTML-- and be significantly more "reachable" by people, easier for them to use and read, link to, and so on and so forth.

Plus you could stick some Google adwords ads on it

But, really... if you're eventually wanting this to be a printed/published/mailed sort of thing, I can understand why you'd want to do it as a PDF... but you will be limiting your audience in the meantime. A lot of people just find it too tedious and difficult, and if your goal is to reach people and communicate....

Why not do both? Might take a bit more work-- but the layout you have isn't that hard to do in HTML, and there's gotta be a way to html2pdf... I've never wanted to, but there has to be. =)

Thanks v. much for the comments. Not a week goes by that this
limitation doesn't irk me. All I can say is that I feel your pain, and
also I really appreciate the response, because the project succeeds
only according to the enthusiasm that can be generated.

So, why aren't we publishing in HTML and not worrying about PDF?
* Document lodgement in online archives. PDFs are a nice bundled
format which preserves formatting, paging etc, isn't resolution
dependent
* Page numbers and tables of contents
* Lack of a WYSIWYG gui for advance HTML layouts fully supporting
all browser differences.
* Source application is currently OpenOffice, which *definitely*
doesn't support good enough HTML output.
* If you say LaTex, I'll eat your brain. Or my hat. Unless I'm
seriously underrating it, but I don't think so.
* Scribus crashed multiple times when I was testing it out using on
our first version. I think it's too big.

In my explorations, I have found:
* pdf2html is a lame duck
* html2pdf can't be done

The only possibility is going from something like odt to both PDF and
html, but you seriously lose out in using OpenOffice to generate the
HTML. I haven't been able to identify a truly working upstream
application from which both HTML and PDF can be derived.

PDF2ASCII works okay, but you lose your images.

Docbook format appears to be a possibility, but it lacks a good GUI
for editing in, so you're talking raw XML. OpenOffice claims to
support it, but I couldn't get it to work properly.

Article submissions need to be handled in a variety of formats,
usually word or OpenOffice are used, for example.

It might be possible using Python and ReportLabs to *write* something
which would support a layout which could be translated into HTML and
PDF without a major loss of quality, but this is a major project in
its own right. It would also require that authors make proper use of
sections and heading options rather than just fiddling with the font
size. <sigh>.

Trust me, I thought about it. It still bugs me. It will probably bug
me forever. At this stage, the only viable options I can see are to go
to HTML as the primary format, increase the workload involved in
typesetting and layout, and abandon the idea of a print-friendly
layout, or to continue with the current situation despite its
drawbacks.

If anyone has any good ideas for how to cope as a publisher with these
difficulties, I'm all ears. I want something that Just Works. If
there's a Good Way to Do Things, I'll happily adopt it.

Cheers,
-T (Editor-In-Chief)

 

[Tool69]

I've recently tried the docutils's reST module with Pygments ( to
highlight Python sources), so you can have LaTeX + HTML + PDF output
(You can see what it renders here :
h**p://kib2.free.fr/geoPyX/geoPyX.html ). It worked fine, but needs a
little work to suit your needs (you'll have to write your own CSS, and
maybe your LaTeX preambule ).

For OpenOffice, a friend wrote a little Python script that colourize a
Python source inside a document. I think It will be possible to write
your own for HTML output, but the ooo API docs aren't well documented
for Python.

Chears,
6Tool9

 

[kilnhead]

I for one like the pdf format. Nothing irks me more than help files in
multipage HTML. I want a document I can easily download and save.
Thanks for your efforts.

 

[jdunck]

1.) It takes too many clicks to download.
A) We know, but it's like that to save our server. We will be
publishing to a number of online archives, back-issues may be
back-linkable from those.

Please consider using S3, coral cache, or similar to distribute, if the
server limitations are a cause of fewer people reading.

I'd be happy to help you get going with S3 if you like, otherwise,
coral CDN couldn't be simpler to use (if a bit unstable).

 

[Klaas]

* If you say LaTex, I'll eat your brain. Or my hat. Unless I'm
seriously underrating it, but I don't think so.

Why? It is a suitable solution to this problem. You can produce
unformatted content, then produce pdf and html pages from it.

-Mike

 

[tleeuwenburg]

Yes, it's true that you can't resell copies of The Python Papers for
personal profits, but you may derive from it, reproduce and propagate
it. You're quite right to point it out.

Licenses are too complicated. I don't believe a license exists which
meets the demands of all clients, however should I be wrong on this
count, nothing prevents us from using it in future editions.

Also, copyright is always held by the original authors, so the works
may be relicensed if necessary. We are still working on the copyright
agreement with future authors, however at this stage all we are asking
from them is the same license which covers the journal.

I'm not a true expert in this area, although I'm of course vaguely
aware of the GPL and CC. When choosing a license, the editorial board
was interested in finding something that could be easily assimilated by
authors, and that reflected a general encouragement of the
dissemination of information.

The point about not being able to be re-used by e.g., the Python
documentation website, is a bit of a thorn in my side as I had hoped
that we had chosen something which would allow the information to flow
through the community.

Perhaps people could comment on the following proposition -- if an
organisation is Not for Profit, its dealings are therefore
Noncommercial?

Cheers,
-T
(Editor-In-Chief)

 

[tleeuwenburg]

The adobe people have online conversion

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlinetools.html

google seems to convert them when they end up in the engines

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pdf+to+html

has a list of converters

http://www.dexrow.com

The adobe online version crashed on the PDF I sent it, which may be
fractionally different from the one currently available.

I haven't tried the others, but I don't feel good about it. However,
maybe I should try a few... If anyone here feels like trying and has
any success, I'd be happy to hear it.

Cheers,
-T
(Editor-In-Chief)

 

[Paul Boddie]

Why? It is a suitable solution to this problem. You can produce
unformatted content, then produce pdf and html pages from it.

Sure, LaTeX probably has some way of producing a reasonable layout, or
at least TeX will be able to do it, but by then you're in a sea of
backslashes and eating the factory that makes the hats.

Paul

P.S. I know it's a bit unfair to pour scorn on LaTeX - after all, if I
were writing a long report or paper, I'd probably consider using it
(with LyX, I imagine) - but dealing with layout issues in the W3C
family of technologies (CSS, XSL-FO, anything using the same basic
layout model) is a more attractive predicament, despite the
occasionally bizarre and generally lengthy specifications.

 

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

Perhaps people could comment on the following proposition -- if an
organisation is Not for Profit, its dealings are therefore
Noncommercial?

NO, not as I understand it... "Not-for-Profit" essentially indicates
that any income made by the company is not available for distribution to
the company owners (no dividends to shareholders). I haven't actually
checked, but I suspect Goodwill and Salvation Army are both "not for
profit", but you sure can't say their stores are noncommercial...

http://www.investorwords.com/3353/not_for_profit_organization.html
--
Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber KD6MOG
(e-mail address removed) (e-mail address removed)
HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/
(Bestiaria Support Staff: (e-mail address removed))
HTTP://www.bestiaria.com/

 

[Ben Finney]

Yes, it's true that you can't resell copies of The Python Papers for
personal profits, but you may derive from it, reproduce and
propagate it. You're quite right to point it out.

Then please revise the false statement that the publication is "free
as in beer and freedom", or make it true by releasing the documents
under a license that does grant conventional free-software freedoms.

 

[tleeuwenburg]

Then please revise the false statement that the publication is "free
as in beer and freedom", or make it true by releasing the documents
under a license that does grant conventional free-software freedoms.

--
\ "They can not take away our self respect if we do not give it |
`\ to them." -- Mahatma Gandhi |
_o__) |
Ben Finney

I thought I just had. In what way does the statement "Yes, it's true
that you can't resell copies of The Python Papers for personal profits,
but you may derive from it, reproduce and propagate it" not provide
such a revision and clarification? Seriously, let me know what exact
statement you feel needs to be made, and I will endorse it accordingly
if it is accurate.

For my part, I don't see that there are ethically serious restrictions
on the freedom of use of the information contained within The Python
Papers. Call it "mostly free" if you like. There's no such thing as
complete freedom of information anyway, and we have done the best we
can.

It's not software. The GPL is not the only license which preserves the
free use of the information containted within and I don't think there's
any contradiction in what we are doing...

We considered releasing under the GPL, but felt that we wanted to
preserve two things which don't seem to be provided by it:
* Rights of the author to attribution as may be expected and desired
of an academic publication. The GPL doesn't seem appropriate for
disseminating the work of a single author.
* Rights of the author to have their words presented
* Opportunity for the author to commercially license their works to
other vendors. By choosing the Share Alike restriction, we have
encouraged the free dissemination of research information without
affecting its commercial use. It seemed to be the best middle ground
between taking a strong ideological position on either side that would
be bound to put people off side. It preserves some rights for the
author while still allowing a substantial amount of free re-use.
* Reputation as an unbiased, financially disinterested group. By
distributing under the license we chose, we hoped to establish our
credentials.

Your email indicates a possible concern that we are doing something
untoward -- this was not at all intended, nor is it true.

Cheers,
-T
(Editor-In-Chief)

 

[tleeuwenburg]

I thought I just had. In what way does the statement "Yes, it's true
that you can't resell copies of The Python Papers for personal profits,
but you may derive from it, reproduce and propagate it" not provide
such a revision and clarification? Seriously, let me know what exact
statement you feel needs to be made, and I will endorse it accordingly
if it is accurate.

For my part, I don't see that there are ethically serious restrictions
on the freedom of use of the information contained within The Python
Papers. Call it "mostly free" if you like. There's no such thing as
complete freedom of information anyway, and we have done the best we
can.

It's not software. The GPL is not the only license which preserves the
free use of the information containted within and I don't think there's
any contradiction in what we are doing...

We considered releasing under the GPL, but felt that we wanted to
preserve two things which don't seem to be provided by it:
* Rights of the author to attribution as may be expected and desired
of an academic publication. The GPL doesn't seem appropriate for
disseminating the work of a single author.
* Rights of the author to have their words presented in their originial form
* Opportunity for the author to commercially license their works to
other vendors. By choosing the Share Alike restriction, we have
encouraged the free dissemination of research information without
affecting its commercial use. It seemed to be the best middle ground
between taking a strong ideological position on either side that would
be bound to put people off side. It preserves some rights for the
author while still allowing a substantial amount of free re-use.
* Reputation as an unbiased, financially disinterested group. By
distributing under the license we chose, we hoped to establish our
credentials.

Your email indicates a possible concern that we are doing something
untoward -- this was not at all intended, nor is it true.

Cheers,
-T
(Editor-In-Chief)

Oh, and I should have gone back and revised that 'two' up to 'four'.
Snafu, sorry.

Cheers,
-T
(Only-Human EIC)

 

[Jacques Naude]

I for one like the pdf format. Nothing irks me more than help files in
multipage HTML. I want a document I can easily download and save.
Thanks for your efforts.

As do I. Also, it seems quite in line with how the academic world
approaches their publications.

Looks damn good!

 

[Shane Hathaway]

I thought I just had. In what way does the statement "Yes, it's true
that you can't resell copies of The Python Papers for personal profits,
but you may derive from it, reproduce and propagate it" not provide
such a revision and clarification? Seriously, let me know what exact
statement you feel needs to be made, and I will endorse it accordingly
if it is accurate.

The phrase "free as in freedom" is commonly understood differently from
the way you are using it. Free as in freedom usually grants the right
to distribute for a fee. Many Linux distributors depend on that right;
otherwise they wouldn't have the right to sell CDs.

IMHO your licensing terms are fine; you don't need to switch from the CC
license. Just avoid the term "free as in freedom", since the Free
Software Foundation has assigned that phrase a very specific meaning.

Shane