Nextcloud Publishing (NCP) — Pipeline Schematic

A first stage Beta open-source software development project — digital sovereign by design

Team NCP: VEStOR (FHP); TIB

2026-02-16

The NCP Pipeline Overview

Project objective: To enable multi-format texbook production, including computational parts, for the Open Access textbook publisher ‘OpenRewi’.

Nextcloud is used as a foundation for a new open-source software tool.

Pipeline Stages

Definitions and tech stack

1. Authoring	2. Production	3. Make Book	4. Multi-format	5. Packaging
A. Creating word processor documents B. Creating & using citations C. Computational parts use Jupyter	A. Editorial and production tasks: Review to file revision, etc B. Metadata and PID use	A. Collate ODT files B. Encode and organisation Parts of a Book C. Book configuration	A. Convert to multi-format: PDF, PoD, web, source, etc B. Automatic layout styling C. Preview D. Jupyter Notebooks	A. Store all outputs C. Git versioning D. Public or private D. Website option
Word processor TBC; Zotero; Jupyter	Nextcloud: Thoth	New original software: NCP Make Book	Quarto / Pandoc; Jupyter	Quarto; GitLab

Use https://tablegenerator.com/markdown_tables

Parts of a Book. See Chicago Manual of Style

Pipeline Stages and Software

Pipeline key: Satges - blue, and; Software - green

Config File - holds it all together

# A Quarto project configuration file (_quarto.yml)  
project:
  type: book
book:
  title: "Book Title"
  author: "Author Name"
  date: "2026-02-13"
  doi: "10.1234/example.doi"
  chapters:
    - index.qmd
    - data.qmd
    - notebook.ipynb
    - references.qmd
bibliography: references.bib
repositories:
  - name: "Online Book Repository"
    url: "https://gitlab.com/account/repo"
format:
  html:
    theme: cosmo
  pdf:
    documentclass: scrreprt
  epub:
    cover-image: cover.png

The challenge is how to get all the Part of a Book into the Quarto Book Config file. There will be further configuration files as part of the project, but this Quarto example is as an illustration of the concept.

1. Authoring and 2. Production

Word processor and Zotero on Nextcloud. Computational parts are not authored here but integrated at later stage.

Nextcloud allows for editorial and production customisation and flexibility with a suite of productivity tools.

3. Make Book 📕

This is the new software being made for the project. Functionalities are:

• Collate ODT files
• Citation management
• Create book settings configuration, inc. Parts of a Book
• Incorporate book metadata
• Pass book data to Pandoc (Multi-format-conversion) and Quarto (Packaging)

4. Multi-format and 5. Packaging

Quarto and Pandoc are used for automated multi-format conversion and typesetting.

Machine readable storage standard, e.g., W3C Web Publications and Quarto structure.

#Quarto file structure in a Git repository
mybook/
├─ quarto.yml
├─ chapter1.qmd
├─ chapter2.ipynb
│
├─ notebooks/figures.ipynb
│
├─ data/dataset.csv
│
├─ images/
│
├─ references.bib
│
├─ styles/custom.scss
│
└─ _book/
   ├─ html/index.html
   ├─ pdf/mybook.pdf
   ├─ epub/mybook.epub
   ├─ docx/mybook.docx
   ├─ jats/mybook.xml
   ├─ bits/mybook.xml
   └─ notebooks/mybook.ipynb 

Publishers Workflow (Sketch)

The New Software - Make Book 📕

Ideas

• Using esablished platforms
• Nextcloud as productivity suite
  
• Using Notebooks allows for computational parts
• Thoth allows for metamdata distribution
• Leverage Quarto functionality
• Concept of packaging from software
  

Challenges

• Reliability of platforms
• Collating ODT files
• Collation and citations
• Citations working
• Packaging
  
• Testing word processors
• Work woth Notebook authors

Next Stage

Testing book files in the workflow manually to find issues.

Write up schematic and workflow for as a Request for Comment (RFC) to get feedback from the community.