Horological Meandering

You pose an interesting question. Since my name on the masthead has the words "Managing Editor" next to it, I will try to answer. 

You correctly note that we are providing the forum as a people to express themselves, and some do it casually, as in "Great Watch!" and others, like myself write longer and/or more technically-interesting articles worthy of saving. We (Moderators) and they (visitors/members/etc) are primarily watch enthusiasts, not publishers.

Most of these articles are produced using our interfaces, either on a laptop, desktop or more infrequently on a hand-held device. Some of the technically-astute visitors here compose and format their articles in Word or another text editor and place them onto the forum via our software. That software also generates HTML code that is capable of displaying the text and graphics dynamically to fit on a variety of devices.

Users may also utilize our editorial interface to upload and host their images, or they may choose to host them elsewhere (with the consequence that they can also take them down whenever they want - as so often happens on TimeZone and other non-hosting sites). Our platform also downsamples the images to a reasonable size since we are hosting them at our cost on multiple servers around the world. 

Finally, many of the articles appear in various ways on Facebook or Instagram, and our related magazine site called WATCHPROZINE

As you may or may not have noticed, we do not host PDF downloads of files at this time - authors cannot upload a related PDF to our servers and embed a link in their story to that PDF. They would have to provide that functionality using their own host.

There are issues of permissions and copyright that we might have to worry about, but not right now.

So the challenge as I understand it:

1. We would need the ability to efficiently compose a PDF document to A4 or US letter size pages.

2. We would need to do this on the fly, or save it for downloading by the original requestor or others.

3. We would have to provide some decision-making step whether to allow the thread of comments along with the original, or not.

As you probably know, these are significant tasks - I've been doing technical publishing for 40 years and understand the issues. In many, if not all cases where I have attempted to do this using Blogger input, we have failed to find satisfactory results without human intervention. This happens most often with images and tabular tables -- which are critical in articles of a technical nature. We can't just leave them out or break them across pages.

We have already received Bill's input as the chief honcho. He determines allocation of effort and resources -- this may lead to some discussion for us.

Cheers,

Mike

 

  login to reply