PKP Support

by **mcyzyk** » Fri Aug 15, 2008 12:45 pm

I just upgraded to the lastest OCS and am happy to find the various reporting and data import/export functions there. However, my question is: Are there any plans for including a module that will allow printing, i.e., generation of a printer-ready PDF, of a conference Programme or the final Proceedings directly from within OCS, or is the intention that you extract the data and do this elsewhere?

by **asmecher** » Mon Aug 18, 2008 12:50 pm

Hi mcyzyk,

This kind of feature has come up in conversation a few times, but nothing beyond that for the moment; we'll eventually be looking into similar features for OJS, and they'll likely trickle into OCS thereafter. However, given the immense variability in conferences and thus the many kinds of extracts, it's not likely to become a high priority for us. Perhaps there's some middle ground that might be useful, e.g. exports to spreadsheets that could then be laid out in a traditional program?

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

by **tconibear** » Fri Mar 27, 2009 5:32 am

Hi mcyzyk,

I was looking for answers to your question too. I am organising a medium sized conference (350) for the first time and was hoping to make use of as much opensource software as possible.

Did you manage to export submitted abstracts into a suitable software package to generate a proceedings booklet? Did you find your use of OCS OK for your needs in the end?

I also need to ensure that special characters and formatting (italics, bold, underline) will be recognised and converted OK.

Regards

Tim

by **schiette** » Tue Apr 07, 2009 2:12 pm

Hi Tim,

Did you manage to export submitted abstracts into a suitable software package to generate a proceedings booklet? Did you find your use of OCS OK for your needs in the end?

We're currently running a test conference using OCS 2.1.1 and I just managed to generate a book of abstract using the Paper XML Plugin. Please note that our OCS conference is abstracts only as we plan to use OJS for the refereed proceedings submission. Hence, the exported XML files may have only a few Mb compared to Gb if it contains 300 full papers. Here is the recipe:

go to Conference Manager > Import/Export Data > Papers XML Plugin > Export Papers
select the papers you want to export. (If clicking "select all" then "export" doesn't work, here is a patch: http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3999.)
click export which will save the abstract info into a file named paper.xml (do not open it yet, save it). In our case, this file contains only the abstracts (usually pasted from MSWord) and the authors info as no papers are submitted with OCS.
now, in the same directory as paper.xml, create an XSLT file, which is a style sheet/template for XML files. It allows you to select the parts of the informations contained in the XML file that you want to display.

For example, to generate a book of abstract, you can create a file abstracts.xsl that contains:

Code: Select all: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:template match="/"> <html> <body> <h2>Book of abstracts</h2> <xsl:for-each select="papers"> <xsl:for-each select="paper"> <b><xsl:value-of select="title"/></b><br /> <xsl:for-each select="author"> <i><xsl:value-of select="firstname"/> <xsl:value-of select="lastname"/>, <xsl:value-of select="affiliation"/></i><br /> </xsl:for-each> <br /> <xsl:value-of select="abstract" disable-output-escaping="yes"/><br /><br /> </xsl:for-each> </xsl:for-each> </body> </html> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet>

(Note the use of   as a space character; the usual   does not work in XML.) Then, with a text editor (WordPad will do the job), open your paper.xml file and add the following as the second line:

Code: Select all: <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="abstracts.xsl"?>

This instructs the program that opens the .xml file to use this .xsl file as a stylesheet. You can now open paper.xml with MSWord or IE and they will display a list of all the selected papers with the titles in bold followed by the author names and their affliliation in italic and the abstract with all greek symbols, indices and exponents, italic and bold nicely conserved. (Sorry, I've not been able to make it work properly with Firefox or OpenOffice so far because all MS-specific HTML tags generated by Word when people pasted their abstract from an MSWord document show up. But you can cut and paste from IE to OOo.) If you received 350 abstracts, you are now ready for a couple of hours of paragraph formatting before printing!

If you want a table of authors and titles, you can instead use an XSLT file that will generate a table. Again create a .xsl file containing the following (and change the name of the .xsl file on the second line of your .xml file) :

Code: Select all: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:template match="/"> <html> <body> <h2>list of abstract titles and authors</h2> <xsl:for-each select="papers"> <table> <tr> <th>Authors last name</th> <th>Title</th> </tr> <xsl:for-each select="paper"> <tr> <td> <xsl:for-each select="author"> <xsl:value-of select="lastname"/>, </xsl:for-each> </td> <td><xsl:value-of select="title"/></td> </tr> </xsl:for-each> </table> </xsl:for-each> </body> </html> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet>

You can now open paper.xml file with, e.g., Excel.

Finally, we rely quite a lot on the paper ID as a reference number, but the current Paper XML Plugin doesn't export the paper ID in the XML file. To make the plugin do it, you have to edit in the OCS directory the file plugins/importexport/native/NativeExportDom.inc.php and add to function generatePaperDom, after the first line of code, the following:

Code: Select all: /* --- PaperID --- */ XMLCustomWriter::createChildWithText($doc, $root, 'paper_id', $paper->getPaperId());

(Sorry, I never learned how to write patches.) Now, in the two previous .xsl files, you can add "(<xsl:value-of select="paper_id"/>) " in front of the tags "<xsl:value-of select="title"/>" so the paper ID will appear in parenthesis in front of the paper title.

Sorry for the long post, but I'm sure it will help a few people.

François

by **jmacgreg** » Wed Apr 08, 2009 2:04 pm

Hi François,

Actually, that's a very interesting and useful post, and quite frankly something I hadn't thought of before. Many thanks for it.

We're in the process of moving/copying workflow ideas, how-to's, etc. to our development wiki (http://pkp.sfu.ca/wiki), and I think this would make an ideal first how-to for the currently empty OCS Community Documentation page. Would you mind if I were to move the how-to over there, or would want to do so yourself? Please note that at present you will need to register a new account with the wiki to post content; we're planning on removing that hurdle shortly.

Thanks,
James

by **jmacgreg** » Tue Apr 14, 2009 4:17 pm

Hi François,

See also http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4200 -- a bug report for adding paper IDs to export files. Please feel free to CC yourself to the report for further updates; and many thanks once again for this contribution!

Cheers,
James

by **marcob** » Sun Nov 22, 2009 1:31 pm

This thread was very useful to me.
I'm using OCS 2.1.1.2 and the export XML plugin to create a booklet with the abstracts.

My problem is that if I use the Papers XML Plugin this does not include the "Supporting agencies" information.
On the other hand if I use the NLM XML Export Plugin this includes the supporting agencies info (tagged as
affiliation in the export) but does not include the information about the address of the authors (i.e. their University).

So they each leave out one piece of information that I'd like to include!
If there is a solution can someone please let me know? (maybe I'm just missing something obvious).

Would it not be logical for a XML plugin to export EVERYTHING and then let people select what they
want with a stylesheet?

Thanks for any help,

MarcoB

PKP Support

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