Lente.net is the open-access press behind the Journal for Scripture & Theology. The word is a Latin adverb meaning "slowly," as in the old oxymoron festina lente: make haste slowly. Since it's an internet publication, the festina part is taken as read.
For the sake of access and durability, the site's code and the contents of its publications are released on GitHub. This has several benefits. It is also a factor in the decision to compile the site with Jekyll, the static site generator used to build GitHub pages.
Pandoc is another key component (its source). It allows the editors to automatically transform plain-text files written in markdown — or, to be precise, a superset of markdown with enhancements useful for academic writing — into a variety of formats, including HTML, PDF (via LaTeX), and ePub.
Jekyll does not support pandoc natively, which unfortunately means
that GitHub can only serve as an imperfect mirror of Lente.net.
Happily, the jekyll-pandoc-multiple-formats plugin provides
the necessary functionality in other environments. A word of warning,
though: the pandoc plugin makes jekyll processor hungry, particulary
when multiple formats are requested. It is generally not desirable to
use the plugin while running $ jekyll --server --auto.
LaTeX is an éminence grise in open-source software, and it is widely used in the academy — though only rarely in biblical and theological studies. It allows one to produce photo-ready PDFs of high quality and to precise specifications. (It works on all major platforms. Mac users, get MacTeX.) Thanks to pandoc, it can take a much simplified markdown file as an input as well.
For digital machinery, then, Lente.net relies on the following:
- git (version control)
- jekyll (static site generator)
- pandoc (article format conversion)
- LaTeX (generation of PDFs)
Finally, the publication uses David Březina's Skolar typeface in the generation of its PDFs, and also licences it for web use. This is the only aspect of the site that is not open source.
Friends with web development skills, I'd welcome your comments and
input. Take a look at demo.html, in the root directory. It's a
pre-compiled mockup of an article, and it calls on screen.css and
other files in the assets folder.
The first milestone is to get out a live draft (v0.8) in time for the May 2013 meeting of WCST.