temporary-indexing-app/templates/about.html

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						<p class="display-6">Temporary Indexing</p>
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						<p class="display-6">A tool for printing our libraries</p>
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			<p class="lead">Readers of digital books often use software (such as <a href="https://calibre-ebook.com/" target="blank">Calibre</a>) to manage their libraries. They write metadata that describes and organises their collections idiosyncratically, entering information for fields such as title, author, tags, keywords and comments. Yet, this metadata is rarely published and what is called a "library" often amounts to an overwhelming number of files that remain unread and unshared, in a directory on a personal computer.</p>

			<p class="lead">Libraries do so much more than give access to knowledge; they produce sociality. The sharing of texts is a fundamentally social activity; publishing is making public and making publics. How can our libraries be published to help us understand not only their content, but their social context and particularity, and in doing so connect them together?</p>
			
			<p class="lead">Temporary Indexing is an experimental tool for printing, reading and sharing our personal library collections. It makes PDFs of printable catalogue cards from database files produced by installations of Calibre. It is intended to be used in "print parties", social events where we print indices and share our collections in an intimate, one-to-one setting. The tool encourages us to read and edit our libraries as an index made in a moment of printing, sharing, meeting, reading, making public.</p>

			<p class="display-6">How to use it</p>
			<ol>
				<li class="lead">Upload a valid metadata.db file</li>
				<li class="lead">Choose which side, a or b, to include fields for title, author, timestamp, commments and tags</li>
				<li class="lead">Click "generate" to produce an imposed A4 PDF</li>
				<li class="lead">Download, print and cut your PDF in to A6 double-sided cards on paper of your choice</li>
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			<p class="lead">
				Temporary Indexing runs on tools such as <a href="https://flask-wtf.readthedocs.io/en/1.0.x/" target="blank">Flask-WTF</a>, <a href="https://www.sqlite.org/index.html" target="blank">SQLite</a>, <a href="https://pdfcpu.io/" target="blank">pdfcpu</a>, <a href="https://www.reportlab.com/" target="blank">ReportLab</a> and the Python module <a href="https://pypi.org/project/temp-index/" target="blank">temp-index</a>.  It is free software published under the <a href="https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html" target="blank">GNU General Public License v3.0</a>, and can be copied, modified and redistributed from a <a href="https://git.vvvvvvaria.org/simoon/temporary-indexing-app" target="blank">git repository</a>.
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