In Chapter 2, we will report on the business activities conducted this term. First, let’s report on product development, which is also the purpose of our establishment. Fig-6 shows the number of PRs for major products over the past four terms.
The number of PRs for Vivliostyle.js and Vivliostyle CLI, which are key among the major products, has decreased compared to the previous term. Vivliostyle Pub also fell below the previous term. On the other hand, while VFM and Themes exceeded the previous term, the absolute numbers are small, so overall, unfortunately, it can be said that it was subdued compared to the previous term.
Until now, we have been holding “Vivliostyle User and Developer Gatherings” twice a year in spring and autumn as events to generally showcase our development achievements. However, there were issues such as the burden of preparing for presentations being too great, and the number of participants and video viewers being small, making it not an effective publicity activity. Therefore, we decided to review its format after the last Vivliostyle ユーザーと開発者の集い 2023春.
What we came up with was a hands-on event in collaboration with a printing company. This involves inviting users from the public to learn how to operate Vivliostyle while actually using it, and having the PDF they created as a final result printed on-demand by the printing company and presented to the user. This should provide an opportunity for the printing company to showcase its own technology, and for users to learn how to use Vivliostyle.
With the cooperation of 欧文印刷株式会社 (Obun Printing Co., Ltd.), with whom we have a relationship in the editing and production business, we held the 第1回Vivliostyleハンズオンセミナー 講師に教わりながら、Vivliostyleで本を作る！ (First Vivliostyle Hands-on Seminar: Learn from the instructor and create a book with Vivliostyle!). However, the result was that the levels of the participating users varied, with the content being too difficult for beginners and not enough for advanced users, making us acutely aware of the difficulty of hands-on seminars. In the future, the challenge will be to appropriately narrow down the level of participants.
An unexpected outcome of the hands-on seminar was the start of a serial publication on gihyo.jp. The discussion began when an editor from Gijutsu-Hyoron Co., Ltd. proposed the idea at a social gathering after the end of the hands-on seminar. The idea is not for a specific person to write, but for all committers to bring the themes they want to write about. As of the time of writing this article, the following articles have been published.
Although the articles are published on the gihyo.jp site, we have set up a private repository within Vivliostyle’s GitHub repository for article production. Also, in the pull requests for the manuscripts, our organization is involved as a reviewer.