OSP has been working on [Médor](https://medor.coop/) since the magazine started in 2015. Some of the OSP members are actually co-founders of the magazine. Together they set up a magazine for Belgian investigative journalism, which is independent, inclusive and participatory.
The magazine started as a printed magazine, but later also became available in an online form. The magazine works with a membership model, the layout is made with free software, illustrations are often released under open licenses and there is a rotating editorial team. Médor currently has 2782 members and 1764 associates, which is a number that they display on their website :). If you are curious to know more, there is [a very nice page on their website with a description of how Médor was founded](https://medor.coop/medor-cest-quoi-cest-qui/notre-histoire/).
Last week I visited the Médor offices, to get an impression of how the magazine is made. Médor n°31 was in production these days, there was one week to go before the final deadline.
I am particularly interested in the relation between OSP's work and this project, as the magazine has been produced with html2print since the very beginning. It has been 8 years now since Médor started, and a new issue is made every 3 months, which made it possible to finetune and adapt the workflow. I'm curious what has changed over the years and what stayed the same.
For each issue, 3 OSP members or peers work for 3 weeks on the production of one issue. I was wondering how these production weeks are organised: is the layout being made in one big document, where they work on all together? Or is it done in another way?
![announcement page explaining how someone can become a member of Médor]()
It turned out that the final PDF of a Médor issue is not rendered from one document. Instead, a workflow is set up that makes it possible to produce the final PDF in chunks, and each chunk is produced by a different person and also with different tools. Most of the article pages are made with html2print for example, but a special page like the announcement page (see above) explaining how someone can become a member of Médor, is made with Scribus[?]. Each chunk is saved as a PDF and collected in a shared Nextcloud folder.
An important detail that makes it possible to work in this way, is the fact that the production of content and layout is closely linked to each other: the total number of pages of the magazine is fixed from the beginning. A shared spreadsheet is used at the very start of a new issue, where authors can "sign up" for an amount of pages in the issue. The editors use this spreadsheet to decide where each article will be placed. Thanks to this, [ASSUMPTIONS] the design work does not have to wait for the final content to be ready to know if an article will start on the left or right page. This seems not a super important factor perhaps, but pages positioned on the right side have a special function in publications, they usually feel more pleasurable for the beginning of a new section or article. [/ASSUMPTIONS]
* How does the html2print workflow shape the collaboration?
* How do you receive the materials? Can they be edited in parallel?
* How do you sketch and make different versions in the beginning of the work on a new issue?
* What would be layout-wise impossible to do without CSS Regions?
* What are examples of moments that you use CSS or Javascript from 2016?
