Over the past week I’ve done some of the initial development work on CaSSius, the portion of the typesetter for the Open Library of Humanities that produces PDF output. The idea here is that, as a publisher, you want to produce one document and then create HTML and PDF from that single source. CaSSius provides two ways to achieve this.

Announcing CaSSius: a tool to create beautiful paginated PDF documents from HTML content using CSS regions. It is intended to be part of XML-first/XML-in workflows for scholarly communications but may have alternative uses. CaSSius: heavyweight typesetting with lightweight technology.

For some time now, I’ve worked to build an open-source JATS XML typesetter. It’s called meTypeset. It’s not by any means perfect and the approach it takes is unlikely to ever yield 100% good markup from Word input. It does, though, get it right a lot of the time in “basic” (in terms of underlying XML semantic complexity) rich-text documents, which is what most academics (especially in the humanities) are writing.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve had a number of emails about the styleguide for the Open Library of Humanities. Queries range from “my discipline does things differently, is that OK?” to “why bother maintaining your own style guide, why not just refer to a named style like Chicago?” Both good points. My own thinking actually goes further, though.

I was struck by this tweet from Lynne Murphy today: International Summer School has started, which means the campus is full of young American women calling each other 'dude'. — Lynne Murphy (@lynneguist) June 29, 2015 For those who don’t know, Lynne is an American linguist who lives in England and teaches at the University of Sussex, and blogs regularly about differences between British and American varieties of English.

The following is the slightly revised text of my keynote at the Action Writing: The Politics of US Literature, 1960-Present , held at Birkbeck College, University of London on the 3rd July 2015, organized by Catherine Flay and Pippa Eldridge.

When I wrote about my son’s use of “they” pronouns to refer to a single, specific person, I mentioned how there are people who want to be referred to with “they” or another set of gender-neutral pronouns because they don’t want to be identified by a gender. This change is also happening, but it’s not as straightforward as it sounds. A few months ago I got into a small argument on Facebook.

The news these days is that “cisgender” has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED is a descriptive tool, so if people are using the word, the editors should put it in. But as a transgender person, I don’t like the word and I’m not happy people are using it. Ben Zimmer had a nice writeup about the word in March.

If you think carefully about research publication and its economics, a strange (but also obvious) point becomes clear. In university ecosystems where we have tuition fees (and probably in those without) we determine how much material can be published through the frame of reference of teaching. This can be seen if you accept that research in the academy serves the dual function of dissemination and assessment.

Some thoughts… What can it mean to think of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as a conservative text? Its author, certainly, does not come across as a political Conservative and is more likely to grace the pages of the Guardian than the Daily Mail . Mitchell is also no backwards-looking Luddite;