We’ve been thinking for a while that it would be a nice addition to the Open Shakespeare project to produce an “Open Shakespeare Edition” of the Bard’s works.
By an ‘Edition’ we meant something designed as a book and suitable for printing: so an elegant title page, relevant front-matter, properly typeset text etc. This could then be downloaded by users and printed or even offered in dead-tree version directly using print-on-demand.
Recently, we’ve made a start on this endeavour using the moby XML sources, xsl and latex. An example of the results can be seen at:
http://www.openshakespeare.org/images/twelfth_night-v0.2.pdf
As a cursory look at that will show, while the body of the play doesn’t look too bad, the front-page could do with improvement (and the front-matter generally needs some planning). So, questions for readers:
- Anyone out there with design skills or suggestions who could help us out?
- Would it make sense to run a design competition?
- What kind of general look should we go for? For example, should we go for:
- Ultra traditional (but perhaps with some mods e.g. replacing the standard
‘copyright’ section with something about open knowledge) - Something irreverent, for example along the lines of the sketch on http://okfn.org/wiki/ShakespeareBookDesign
- Ultra traditional (but perhaps with some mods e.g. replacing the standard
Any ideas or suggestions post a comment or drop us a line we’d love to know what you think.
Rufus Pollock is Founder and President of Open Knowledge.
