River Valley Technologies

Berlin conference recordings available online

kaveh — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:51:35 +0000

Our recordings for the Berlin conference on “Academic Publishing in Europe” are available here. Due to the good lighting and good sound feed we got quite satisfactory results.

The Hindu visits River Valley

kaveh — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:02:07 +0000

A while ago, the Hindu newspaper visited our campus, and interviewed CVR. Here is their report. Please note several errors, such as “River Bank Technologies”!

Conference room up and running

kaveh — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:51:39 +0000

Work has been continuing on our conference room, but it is now fully functional and being used for tutorials and internal presentations. With a capacity of some 80 people we are hoping to host conferences on our campus in the near future.

[[Show as slideshow]]

First crop of bananas sold to staff

kaveh — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 10:34:05 +0000

In a bid to promote fresh organic produce within our community, we offered our first crop of our homegrown bananas at 25 rupees (50c US) per kilo (market rate is 35 rupees) to River Valley staff. The uptake took us by surprise. The entire 25 kilos were sold within 10 minutes with many disappointed customers! But there’ll be another offering soon.

River Valley sponsors XMLPrague in March 2010

kaveh — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 06:39:51 +0000

As part of our conference sponsorship programme, we are happy to be sponsoring an important conference in XML. As part of the sponsorship we plan to record and also to broadcast live using some innovative technologies. So if you can’t go to Prague you can still watch live!

Conference presentation tops 10,000 views

kaveh — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 06:34:52 +0000

The Blender 3D talks have been very popular on our conference recording page. One has just topped 10,000 views!

River Valley sponsors APE 2010 conference in Berlin

kaveh — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 06:01:08 +0000

We are proud to be sponsors of the fifth international conference on “Academic Publishing in Europe“. As part of this sponsorship we will record the talks and upload on our .tv page.

Staff families visit River Valley

kaveh — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 06:34:29 +0000

Having settled down in our new campus, we decided to invite the families of all staff to have lunch with us and get a tour of the site. We limited the numbers to some 25 per day, so the visits will go on for some time. Here are some photos from two visiting days in late December.

Typesetting

Admin — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:59:06 +0000

Our core activity is typesetting mathematical books and journals for academic publishers.

What is delivered to us: Electronic files, e.g. TeX, Word, graphics, multimedia.

What we do to the files: Copy edit, check style for math, references, clean up or generate graphics, etc.

What we deliver: XML/MathML, PDF, rich PDF, HTML, and whatever else the client requires.

What makes us unique: We generate PDFs fully automatically from XML/MathML.

XML–first — our toughest challenge

Publishers rightly demand both PDF and XML from suppliers – PDF for ‘now’, and XML for the future. A problem with XML is that it is very difficult to check for content, because it cannot be easily ‘proofread’ like a PDF file. So it is imperative that when we generate the XML, we can guarantee precise fidelity with the PDF.

Some ten years ago we decided that the only reliable way was to produce the PDF directly and automatically from the XML. This way, checking the PDF would be equivalent to checking the XML. We knew this would be hard, but it proved even harder than we thought, especially with heavy mathematics. But we did it, and now every single page of PDF that we produce, even for the first proof, is generated 100% automatically from the XML file – a true ‘XML-first’ workflow. We believe we are the only company on the planet with this technology for complex text. We have yet to check other planets of course.

Watch a video presentation showing our workflow:

eBooks

kaveh — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 09:15:47 +0000

It may come as no surprise that we favour ePub as the single format for publishing eBooks. ePub is a comprehensive XML specification, and standardizing on this single open format will make it easier for all in future.

Our XML-first technology is ideally suited to rendering ePub on the fly, and we are working hard to implement it. Our strategy is to use TeX as the rendering engine. As part of this programme, we recently succeeded in porting TeX to the iPhone.

And the iPad is going to make things even more exciting…

See a short and a longer presentation regarding our work on eBooks.

In December 2009 Kaveh gave a presentation on ePub at the STM Innovations seminar in London.