Who we are

Writing is at the heart of civilization. Every step forward in the history of writing has been a major step forward in the history of mankind. The latest one, hypertext and the web, working on any device, in every language, giving a voice to anyone, is bringing profound changes to society, connecting people like never before.

But along the way, something of value was lost. Due to technological limitations, typography and typesetting on the web today remain behind what was common place in printed media. Not merely decorative, many of these styling techniques had been developed over decades, even centuries, to improve the reading experience.

Vivliostyle —from βιβλίο (“book”, in Greek) and style— is here to address that. We take CSS, one of the cornerstones of the web, responsible for how it looks, and extend it to support this rich typography tradition. So that the web can be as nice to read as the nicest books. So the nicest books can be made with web technologies. So that web and print don't have to stay separate worlds.

W3C Standards

• HTML5
• CSS: Cascading Style Sheets
• CSS2.1 / CSS2.2(Editors’s Draft)
• CSS Paged Media
• CSS Generated Content for Paged Media (GCPM) 3 / GCPM 4 / Books(whatwg)
• CSS Regions
• CSS Fragmentation
• CSS Writing Modes

• CSS Text 3 / Text 4
• CSS Ruby
• CSS Fonts
• CSS Line Grid
• CSS Logical Properties
• CSS Page Floats / Figures(whatwg)
• … (CSS current work & how to participate)
• W3C Digital Publishing Activity

Community

Vivliostyle Project public mailing list

Announcement from Vivliostyle team. Discussions or requests about Vivliostyle are welcome.

Vivliostyle Forum (Public group on Facebook)

For free discussion about Vivliostyle and CSS typesetting, Japanese and English posts are welcome.

Team and Advisors

Team

Shinyu Murakami

Shinyu has been interested in typesetting and markup languages since early 1990s, at that time he developed and released a text formatting software “XTR”, and later he was involved in project planning and development of an XML typesetting software “Antenna House Formatter”. In 2014, he founded Vivliostyle Inc. for developing the next generation CSS typesetting software. He also participates in W3C standardization activities about CSS typesetting.

Twitter: @MurakamiShinyu

Tomoyuki Ishida

Tomoyuki has been working on typesetting for paper and web for twenty years, with knowledge of English typography and Japanese typesetting.

Toru Kawakubo

A core developer of Vivliostyle.js. He joined Vivliostyle after working on development of an ebook software and a large scale web service. He is especially interested in typesetting of academic books and papers from experience in studying physics at university.

Twitter: @kwkbtr_t

Satoshi Kojima

A core developer of Vivliostyle Formatter. While working at Fuji Xerox as a developer of document processing software, he has developed EPUB books/magazines publishing tools as free software and published EPUB books and magazines using them in his spare time.

Twitter: @skoji

Florian Rivoal

Florian has worked in the CSS Working group for over 4 years, first as Opera Software’s representative, then as an invited expert. He co-edits the Media Queries, CSS Basic User Interface, CSS Device Adaptation, CSS Overflow and CSS Multi-column specifications. He also holds an MBA from INSEAD, and has been the manager of the service for print professionals at Gelato Group, a Norwegian SaaS startup.

Twitter: @frivoal

Johannes Wilm

Johannes was the developer of BookJS – Javscript library that can turn a webpage into a formatted book ready to print or create a PDF.

Twitter: @johanneswilm

Yumi Murakami

Working as a staff of Vivliostyle, but her professions are Speech-Language-Hearing Therapist (ST) and Coaching Specialist. She is author of books Voice and Speech Training (声と話し方のトレーニング), Asperger no yakata (アスペルガーの館), and Counseling Room for Children with Language Development Concerns (ことばの発達が気になる子どもの相談室).

Twitter: @yumimrkm

Advisors

Makoto Murata, Dr. Eng.

Murata is an expert of XML and EPUB who worked for Fuji Xerox and IBM Research - Tokyo. He was the lead of the internationalization subgroup of International Digital Publishing Forum, and was a member of the original W3C XML WG. See Wikipedia: Makoto Murata for details.

Tohru Sampei, Dr. Eng.

Sampei is the Secretary General of The Japan Electronic Publishing Association (JEPA), and an Expert Member of the Legal Deposit Council of the Japan National Diet Library.
Earlier, he was a Vice president of Hitachi Computer Products America, in charge of new multimedia business, as well as a lecturer at Tokyo University of Technology.

Kazuo Shimokawa

CEO and President of EAST Co.,Ltd., which he founded in 1985.
Joined the Japanese Electronic Publishing Association (JEPA) in 1988, and is now a vice chairman.
He organized the “EPUB and Specification Extensions for Japanese Language” project, which was sponsored by the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. This project led to the world-wide support of ruby and vertical text in EPUB readers and browsers.

Elika J. Etemad (fantasai)

Elika (a.k.a. fantasai) is one of the most active spec-writers in W3C CSS Working Group, and a longtime contributor to the Mozilla Project. She co-edits many CSS specifications, including Writing Modes, Text, Ruby, Flexbox, Backgrounds, and Paged Media.

Twitter: @fantasai

Bobby Tung （董 福興）

Twitter: @bobtung

Sanders Kleinfeld

Sanders wrote an excellent article: Responsive Ebook Design: A Primer.

Twitter: @sandersk

Lea Verou

Our name “Vivliostyle” was given by her. First we considered Biblio- or Biblos-, and Lea suggested: since ‘biblio’ and ‘biblos’ both come from Greek, you might also want to consider Vivliostyle, which is on par with how the word is actually pronounced in modern Greek (it’s a widespread mistake that the Greek letter beta (β) is pronounced as b, but it’s actually pronounced as v).
Her book CSS Secrets (O’Reilly Media) was typeset entirely in CSS!

Twitter: @leaverou

Company Profile

Company Name

Vivliostyle Inc.
(“株式会社ビブリオスタイル” in Japanese)

URL

http://vivliostyle.com

CEO

ISHIDA Tomoyuki (石田 智之)

Founded

12 August 2014

4-6 Co-Lab Sendagaya, 1-13-11 Sendagaya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo
151-0051 JAPAN
TEL: +81-3-5775-7296

Contact Us

E-Mail: info@vivliostyle.com