Inspired by the multi-centred cognitive facilities of the octopus, Octomode is a collective editing space for PDF making. Technically speaking, it uses Etherpad for collaborative editing of content and form, and renders a preview of a PDF using Paged.js.
Octomode is a F/LOSS (free/libre open-source software) tool, situated within the publishing practices of collectives such as Varia.
Octomode is a way to cross different types of writing; editorial, design and programming. With Octomode, many people can simultaneously edit the content and the form of PDFs using languages such as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), Markdown and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
Expanded documentation on Octomode can be found here.
As we will be writing in the same stylesheet together, we will need to work with some technical and social protocols.
CSS is a declarative language. Each rule written in CSS includes a selector, a declaration of a property and the values it is given.
We use CSS for the form, and HTML for the content of our design. So, in our stylesheet we need to target the appropriate HTML elements.
In the content, each word will be contained within an HTML element called "span", like so:
Putting a "span" around each word allows us to style them independently. For example, this CSS declaration makes only the first word inside a span (and not the second, third etc.) appear in the color red:
In CSS, you can write comments to annotate your code. These comments are ignored by the browser. Comments in CSS start with /* and end in */. For example:
Choose a word (or some words) you want to style within different span elements. For example, you may want to style the third word:
Please don't change other people's code without agreeing on it together!