How is this magazine made?
Author: Roberto Alsina Translation: Andrés Gattinoni
This magazine is an emergent output of PyAr, the group of Python developers in Argentina. Being a project created by programmers for programmers (and not a project by graphic designers for graphic designers), it has its advantages and disadvantages.
The disadvantage is in plain sight. I had to take care of the visual design. I apologize for any eye-bleeding I may have caused you.
The advantage is that one of us (me) had already grabbed some piece of software (created by a bunch of other people) and kicked it in the butt until I got something resembling a magazine (a book).
So, our programming genes allow us to have a decentralized infrastructure for the design of online magazines, which is multiuser, multi role, multi output (PDF and HTML so far) and automatic.
How automatic? Updating the design of the entire site and the PDF is one command.
These are some of the tools we used, all of them are free software:
- git and gitosis
- A great tool for version control and a great tool for repository management.
- restructured text
- A markup format for documents. One can create simple text files and get an output in almost any format.
- rest2web
- Turns our text files into a website.
- rst2pdf
- Creates PDFs from restructured text.
- make
- Makes sure that each command runs when needed.
- rsync
- Takes care that everything goes to the server so that you can see it.
This being a programming magazine, it has some particular requirements.
- Code
It's necessary to show source code. Rst2pdf has native support using the code-block directive but it's not part of the restructured text standard. Therefore, I had to patch rest2web to use it.
Luckily the directive is completely generic, it works for HTML just like for PDF. This is what I had to add at the begining of r2w.py:
from rst2pdf import pygments_code_block_directive from docutils.parsers.rst import directives directives.register_directive('code-block', \ pygments_code_block_directive.code_block_directive)
- Feedback
- Since the whole idea is to have feedback, you need to be able to give it. Comments on the site are via disqus.
- Typography
It's hard to find a set of good, modern and consistent fonts. I need at least bold, italic, and bold italic for the text and the same in a monospace alternative.
The only families I found that were that complete were DejaVu and Vera typographies.
- HTML
- I suck at HTML, so I borrowed a CSS file called LSR from http://rst2a.com. The typography comes from Google Font APIs.
- Server
- I don't expect it to have a lot of trafic. And even if it does, it wouldn't be a problem: it's a static HTML site, so I put it on a server, courtesy of Net Managers SRL.