about me, and Antenna House Formatter

• Call me “Shinyu”, or “Murakami”.
• I've been the lead developer of Antenna House Formatter.
• Antenna House Formatter is a print formatter supporting W3C standards, such as XSL-FO, SVG, MathML, (X)HTML, and CSS3 Paged Media.

How the Antenna House Formatter was born

• In late 1990s, when I was a freelance programmer,
  I wanted to make an alternative to the TeX typesetting system,
  because the TeX was difficult to me.
• When I found the W3C draft specs—XSL-FO and CSS3 drafts—,
  I thought it was a chance for me!
• Antenna House, Inc., a software company in Tokyo, accepted my idea. (lucky!)
• I expected that the Web browsers (IE, Mozilla, …) would improve much with CSS3; so we started with XSL-FO.

XSL-FO?

• Extensible Stylesheet Language—Formatting Objects
  used with the XML transformation language, XSLT
• for XML document formatting, used to generate PDFs
• We released Antenna House XSL Formatter since 2000
• XSL-FO business is yet growing!
  • for large manual production with DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture)
  • for journal publishing with JATS (Journal Article Tag Suite)
  • etc.

A user case: IRS publications

• IRS = Internal Revenue Service, USA gov
• IRS Publications (PDFs) are formatted with XSL-FO
• AH is used because supports extended page floats, international text layout, etc.

CSS3, Paged Media etc.

• Added CSS support to AH formatter, since v5.0, 2009
• Supports CSS2.1 and CSS3 modules: Multi-column, Writing Modes (vertical text), Paged Media, GCPM (running heads, footnotes, cross-references, …), etc.
• CSS3 with AH extension—nearly similar layout functionality with XSL-FO formatting

Books made with CSS formatting, an example

『W3C技術ノート　日本語組版処理の要件』 (W3C Technical Note: Requirements for Japanese Text Layout; Japanese Print Edition)

W3C Japanese Layout Taskforce

ISBN978-4-501-55020-2 C3004

This book was formatted by Antenna House Formatter with XHTML+CSS(for print).

O'Reilly books, made with CSS formatting

O'Reilly Media books (an example: EPUB 3 Best Practices) are made with XHTML5+CSS formatting (with Antenna House Formatter) since 2012 (they used XSL-FO before)

For making ebooks and print books simultaneously

• Ebooks (EPUB, Kindle, Web online) are made with (X)HTML + CSS
• Print books (or PDFs) can be made with (X)HTML + CSS (for print)
• so CSS paged media spec is important for digital publishing — making ebooks and print books simultaneously

Atlas—O'Reilly's digital publishing system

Antenna House developed CAS-UB, independently

I want Web browsers with good CSS paged media support

• with improved typography, it will enable ebooks/emagazines with advanced and adaptive page layout
• will be incorporated in future EPUB spec
• I want web/ebook browsers having both scroll and paged reading modes, I'd like to switch often.
• with good printing support…

W3C CSS standardization is so important

• The Open Web Platform will unite the world
  —People all over the world can publish Web content, ebooks or print books with their language with good typography and layout.
• The W3C standardization and interoperable implementations, Web browsers and print formatters, will change the world!

Thanks,

http://www.antennahouse.com