Copy That Floppy!

As part of the Future Nostalgia project, we are putting together a guide on preserving floppy disks. The guide is currently in the reviewing stage. The draft version of the guide can be accessed here. You will be able to leave any comments or suggestions.

Click here to view the draft "Copy That Floppy!" guide.

Web Publication Build Process

The publication process is controlled by the Makefile, which contains all the technical details.

• It downloads the source Google Document as a DOCX (because this brings embedded media with it)
• It uses pandoc to convert that to Markdown + media files.
• It patches in a YAML frontmatter block (index_head.md) to set up the document.
• It uses pandoc to generate an ePub version.
• It uses MystMD to generate web and PDF versions.

Notes:

• Conversion didn't use commonmark_x because it added anchors to the headings which MyST does not support.
• PDF generation only works if you remove styling inside hyperlinks (underlines) as this confuses Typst.
• Some things, like big tables, might not convert well. These are best modified at source (GDoc).
• The ePub generation process can pick up some metadata from the source document.
• When developing locally, you can use make from-gdoc serve to rebuild and then look at the results.

Maintenance

After the end of the Future Nostalgia project, the Digital Preservation Coalition will endeavour to ensure this publication remains available and facilitate it's ongoing maintenance and development.