CaSSiuS 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.

#Usage and Quick Start Guide CaSSius takes standard HTML content in a pre-specified form and flows it between CSS regions (see “document structure” below). To begin using CaSSius follow these steps:

  1. Move or copy the “cassius” directory from this repository into the root of your website.

  2. Insert the following code into the head tag of your HTML document:

     <link rel="stylesheet" href="cassius/cassius.css">
 <link rel="stylesheet" href="cassius/cassius-content.css">
 <script type="text/javascript" src="cassius/jquery.js"></script>
 <script type="text/javascript" src="cassius/cassius.js"></script>
 <script src="cassius/regions/css-regions-polyfill.min.js"></script>
  3. Optionally, insert the javascript code for Adobe typekit (you will need to sign up for an account).
  4. Format your document according to the “document structure” guide below.
  5. Replace cassius/images/logo.png with your own logo.
  6. Load the page in a browser, wait until it has finished typesetting and then use the browser’s “print to PDF” option to create your document.

#Document Structure The following rules should be strictly adhered to in order to produce correct documents.

Every HTML file should contain a CaSSius metadata block. A CaSSius metadata block should be wrapped inside a script tag with type set to “text/cassius” and an id attribute of “cassius-metadata. A CaSSius metadata block may contain the following elements:

    <script type="text/cassius" id="cassius-metadata">
        <div id="cassius-metadata-block">
            <div id="cassius-title">Article typeset by CaSSius: heavyweight typesetting with lightweight technology</div>
            <div id="cassius-publication">CaSSius</div>
            <div id="cassius-authors">Martin Paul Eve</div>
            <div id="cassius-affiliations">Department of English and Humanities, School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom</div>
            <div id="cassius-doi">10.16995/olh.001</div>
            <div id="cassius-date">September 2015</div>
        </div>
    </script>

If the “cassius-title” metadata div is not present, CaSSius will use the HTML document’s “title” element in the “head” of the document.

The basic structure of a CaSSius document is as follows (also available in template.html):

<body>
    <div id="cassius-content">
      <h1 class="articletitle"></h1>
      <div class="authors"></div>
      <div class="affiliations"></div>


      <div class="abstract">
          <h2>Abstract</h2>
          <p>Your abstract content here.</p>
          <p>As many paragraphs as needed.</p>
          <p class="oa-info">&copy; 2015 Martin Paul Eve. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.</p>
      </div>

      <div class="main">
          <div class="section">
              <h1>A section title</h1>
              <p>A paragraph.</p>
          </div>

          <div class="section">
              <h1>A section title</h1>
              <p>A paragraph with a footnote.<a href="#fn1--fragment" id="xr1"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
          </div>

          <div class="notes">
              <h1>Notes</h1>
              <div class="footnote"><p><span class="generated"><a href="#xr1--fragment" id="fn1">1</a></span> Footnote content goes here.</p></div>
          </div>

          <div class="references">
              <h1 class="ref-title">References</h1>
              <div class="section ref-list">
                  <ul>
                      <li class="ref-content">Adorno, Theodor W., <i>Negative Dialectics</i>, trans. by E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973)</li>
                  </ul>
              </div>
          </div>
      </div>
    </div>

    <article id="article"></article>

    <script type="text/cassius" id="cassius-metadata">
        <div id="cassius-metadata-block">
            <div id="cassius-title">Article typeset by CaSSius: heavyweight typesetting with lightweight technology</div>
            <div id="cassius-publication">CaSSius</div>
            <div id="cassius-authors">Martin Paul Eve</div>
            <div id="cassius-affiliations">Department of English and Humanities, School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom</div>
            <div id="cassius-doi">10.16995/olh.001</div>
            <div id="cassius-date">September 2015</div>
        </div>
    </script>
</body>

#Import from JATS/NLM An early-stage version of an import function from JATS is implemented in cassius-import/bin/cassius-import.py. This script requires python and java.

Usage:
    cassius-import.py <in-file> <out-file> [options]
    cassius-import.py (-h | --help)
    cassius-import.py --version

A sample XML file to show this working (and the scope of implementation to date) can be found in the cassius-import directory.

#Performance and Settings If you are consistently typesetting documents that are over fifty pages long, you may see a performance increase if you change the value of initialPages to a higher setting in cassius.js. Setting this to a higher value will yield better performance on larger documents, but worse performance on smaller documents.

#Components and Licensing CaSSius is copyright Martin Paul Eve 2015. It is released under the terms specified in LICENSE.

CaSSius makes use of several other open-source/free-software projects, including: