Hi! I am a scientist, and for many years I have been looking for a convenient tool for interactive work with the possibility of joint editing. Fidus Writer is very similar to the ideal I’ve been looking for all this time. As for working with the content itself, there are no questions here, all the main functions seem to be available. But there is one significant point that does not yet allow me to move on to the practical use of the editor in my work - this is the creation of custom document styles. Different publishers may have specific requirements for the font used in the article, line spacing, or page margins. Or for example, it is necessary that the text is arranged in two columns. As I understand it, the appearance is controlled by the document styles and, if necessary, the list of existing styles can be expanded. But how is it suggested to create such styles? Can an ordinary person without a solid programming experience independently prepare such a style? Is there any simplified way to generate such stylistic rules without requiring programming? Or at least some simple step-by-step guide to how to make them? Unfortunately, the search did not provide any answers to these questions. I would be grateful for any help in solving this issue
I agree that a guide would be helpful. However, my answer to your question if you do not need programming skills would be ‘yes’. The appearance of the text is controlled via standard CSS for which you find plenty of how-tos in the Net.
I would not start from scratch but take one of the standard document styles and change it bit for bit to accomodate your needs. You find the style sheet within the document template in the window Document style -> CSS style. Copy the whole text and paste it into a text editor. You will find that the mark-ups are quite straight-forward. The main difficulty lies in the identification of the different elements which control the appearance. For example, custom code for third order headings could look like that:
.user-contents h3 {
font-size: 16px;
margin-bottom: 5px;
margin-top: 25px;
}
Appearance is important to but I would not spend too much time on it, to be honest. For most journals, you will not be able to submit it directly via Fiduswriter (which is technically possible), but as, for example, doc-file. You will need to export it when you are finished with your paper, and the export follows different rules than the CSS-styles. Therefore, you might be advised to spend more time in preconfiguring your export-template.
That said, playing around with CSS is fun, too!
Thank you, I studied the way with manual CSS editing based on the available samples. This method is probably real in principle, but it is extremely difficult for me. It’s one thing to change the font size, another-to set your own typeface, layout in two columns, the maximum number of consecutive hyphenations, the style of footnotes or the design of captions for illustrations. Probably, all this can be done if there were a guide or examples on the basis of which it would be possible to understand. But the option of self-learning CSS from textbooks and articles from the web looks too complicated to deal with it in a week or two and go to real work. So far, it looks more realistic to export the content to LaTeX and design the final layout in another editor. So far, I’m experimenting in this direction, but there are also pitfalls there
Hey,
most users want to get some final output format with specific formatting for print and in the form of a PDF. There are several different ways of getting there, yet depending on how close you have to get to a specific style, the extra work needed can get quite complex. CSS is likely the most used language to specify design/layout these days due to the importance of the web. Some who are more familiar with print layouting will prefer LaTeX. Again others who know the production workflow of major publishers will prefer JATS XML. Fidus Writer provides all of these and you just have to see what is the easiest for you.
If you don’t have access to a programmer or layouting professional at all, the easiest is probably to create ODT or DOCX export templates. Those can be creates visually using nothing except your favorite word processor. Note though that there are some limitations in what export template can specify. For example, there is currently no way to say that the author section should have three columns if there are 3 authors and 2 columns if there are 2 authors.
The Technical University of Munich (TUM) has recently published a wiki that explains some of the differences: https://wiki.tum.de/display/FidusWriter/g)+Document+templates%2C+styles+and+export+templates
I am wondering if it would be useful to create something like a wider library of styles/export templates that mimic common journal styles. These could be accessible through an online browseable archive.