Chroma Journal and a markdown production template

Publication Ecosystem
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Hi folks, I’d like to introduce “Chroma: Journal of the Australasian Computer Music Association”:

https://journal.computermusic.org.au/chroma/issue/view/1

This journal is community-run, open-access, and no-cost to authors and the whole production process uses markdown, and pandoc to create the PDF and HTML outputs.

I’ve written about the backend processes here: https://charlesmartin.au/blog/2022/08/30/rebooting-chroma

and the markdown template is here: https://github.com/cpmpercussion/chroma-template

Now I’m not saying that we should use all of the above for NIME. But I guess I’m not not saying it either. The idea with the markdown template above is to have a process where I can do the journal production process basically by myself for the small number of articles that we move through our pipeline. I’d love to have a whole web-based authoring UI like Overleaf or Pubpub to put that responsibility on authors, but it’s a bit hard to figure out how that would work. At the moment, authors send me a word doc and I just convert it to markdown and plonk that into my template which is fairly low-effort (although it wouldn’t scale easily to 100+ articles per year at something like NIME).

Anyway, just wanted to share the above, let me know what you think.

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Hi all,

Thanks @charlesmartin , this is very interesting. I’ve switched to markdown myself and the pandoc (md->pdf) workflow is definitely a good solution because it allows for:

  1. simple edition for people who are not familiar with LaTeX (which can even be done using a GUI with preview)
  2. but also for the integration of more advanced LaTeX commands within markdown (contrary to PubPub if I’m not mistaken)

Florent

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Thanks for that!

I didn’t know pandoc used --citeproc to deal with references within markdown. That’s handy.

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Thanks Florent! It would be great to see a more integrated authoring solution for markdown, including pandoc, something like Overleaf does for latex. In quiet moments I dream about some kind of decentralised publication workflow that can be hosted on a self-managed server but… not quite there yet!

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Yep citeproc is pretty good really. Unfortunately I haven’t had any authors for this journal use it --they tend to just write out references in a word doc and they end up converted into hardcoded markdown.

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