Permapublishing

These are the notes that we took during two conversations at the PPP event at Paris on 4 + 5 April 2025.

Friday

permacomputing <> pre post print-like publishing practices (wow 5 p's!)

https://prepostprint.org/pppermapublishing/

inspired by https://permacomputing.net

Timothee: me and Victor organised PPPermapublish in Strasbourgh last September

did not go far enough into the topic

lot of demo's and discussions

lot of seeds were planted at the time, but we did not develop a deep understanding of it yet

it was more a beginning of the discussion, maybe today is the follow up?

How can we integrate permacomputing into publishing?

We both organised it but for that reason we also missed a lot.

Victor: Why permapublishing in strasbourg?

We are both in a practice around unix ways of doing things

Working in the terminal with shell

with Arthur and Marc, who were doing all the things through the shell

which is a very light weight way of working

which makes old computers, eg from 2000s, still powerful

how can you live your daily life in the shell :)

katzele (http://katzele.netlib.re/ (fr)) the name of this group

the project is there to try to implement permacomputing principles

if you need a website, you don't need 5 people hosting a server in their home..

you can have 1 raspberry in one house, and host everything there

speaking of permapublishing...

permapublishing is about autonomy

and if you think of your printer, and your ink, it is hard

if it's about being self-reliant on every aspect in their practice

Eleni: Since you mentioned printer... I realise that my HP printer that i bought for 40 EUR. It will be less expansive to get a new printer, rather then getting new ink for the printer.

What about hacking my printer...

Marie : our friend Cloé worked on « ink-jacking », about how you hack the printer by reinjecting ink in cartriges with a synringe download the ZINE: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-qDJGA_EXxNMl_lk42FijsKhOd7TncCA

in response to the question of autonomy: i don't agree that permacomputing is about autonomy

the metaphor of the camper off-grid is really a misconception of what permacomputing can be

this is a very individualistic mindset

it's very hard to do someting by yourself, that is why we want to form communities

the question of dependency is super important, to know who has the power, but it's not about building things from scratch

permapublishing is not about producing our own computer, same as permacomputing is not about building your own computer.

it's more about: how many resources do we need?

This makes me think of Oliver Bertrand « surfaces utiles », who is a publisher, printed on the edges of a book, making zines that could fit on the edges of a print plate.

"Doing things in the edges" (beautiful phrase!)

Victor: already doubted the word autonomy...

in Strasbourgh, there was a big factory... and it closed down. they did fancy papers, and now it is closed.

there is no printer in the city where you can go to see the paper, you can go to the art school, but without access there, you don't have access to paper

A second big word: facism.

If someone can prevent someone access from publishing tools...

Who can prevent someone to have access from the paper?

What if the crisis of facism comes...

if you know how to organise information and share it, it's very important.

Tessa: with my class at my bachelor we went to visit Chile.. there have been big civil riots around disagreements in the constitution. The situation was very tense. There was a printing shop ran by the students.. 5 people in the class died... in response, classmates printed a lot of things and had to operate without electricity. They set up a manual offset print station, going back to older techniques. This was a very eye opening moment.

Yann: this really echoes. We are building a collective print workshop in Fontenay: risociation. Paying the rent together, buying the materials, machines...

Many of us are working on « Déborder Bolloré », (8th richest person in France, Bolloré owns Hachette for instance), https://deborderbollore.fr/ many of us are involved in this project,. It's not official yet; but hopefully in the summer we're organizing this event in Fontenay with other workshops in france and other parts of europe. Gather together and organize ourselves

So if you are interested in this, and part of a print workshop similarly, feel free to reach out.

Marie: Is the idea to make a printshop?

Yann: Yes this is already happening. It's more about organising now how we work together in the studio. The event will be an opening of this place, to say it exists. Also as an example that can be appriated by other people. The idea is to keep locality in mind, because sometimes it makes more sense to print in another city or place. You cannot solve the problems on your own.

Martin: getting a xerox machine is actually pretty cheap, companies sell them all the time, when the maintenance contract ends. The company who does the maintenance need to pay money to take the "old" machine back, and sells it for a low price, like 200 EUR. The problem becomes to maintain it yourself.

Manetta: i was curious to bring the convo back to software : i think it's interresting to share our infrastructures, when we speak about software the words become super fuzzy. Browsers become heavier and heavier for the computer to run.

Postscript is great but not made in a way to make you write it with hands

Postcript can be executed on mac only with a postscript to pdf tool

I realized later [after the postscript workshop] that the code could actually be ran from the printer itself

Victor :

   A friend (marc chantreux) is against browser

   other ways to access the web without a gui browser: software: >>>>

   w3m https://w3m.sourceforge.net/index.en.html

   lynx https://terminaltrove.com/lynx/

   chawan (includes javascript and css in your terminal!?!)

   ↑ examples of software to not use "regular" gui browsers

Can you live without a browser?

Javascript is heavy, so with people without a strong internet connection, you can better only use html and css

but for designers, it starts to become very boring

it limits the playfulness on the web

groff/roff

postscript

latex

these are all different layout environments to make layout

how much can we be playful with it?

was there a graphic designer who used groff in there practice?

trans-something...

working with other people

what culture do we have here?

there is a practice to convert the one language into the other (as a kind of bridging)

can this enable collaboration?

Marie : What was before postscript ? - tendency to look at the past

Manetta showing : print shop https://theprintshop.club/

a tool to make greeting cards, as a reaction to hallmark

this tool includes a kaleidoscope viewer, just for the fun of it, it's not only about production, i think we lack this weirdness in the softwares we use now

electric zine maker - https://alienmelon.itch.io/electric-zine-maker

permacomputing forum to continue the discussion : https://bbs.permacomputing.net/

links that came up in after conversations

- http://screenl.es/things.html

- https://varia.zone/en/plaintext-protocols-partyline.html + https://vvvvvvaria.org/archive/2022-09-17-16-Plaintext-Protocol-Partyline/

- https://git.sr.ht/~bptato/chawan in between terminal and browser

an attempt of a draft of an opening post on bbs.permacomputing.net

[discuss] What could permapublishing be?

We are gathering here in Paris today and tomorrow with peers from the PrePostPrint network, and earlier this afternoon we sat down to pick up the conversation around permapublishing that started last September in Strassbourgh: what can it be? What was discussed last September? Which initiatives are happening? We only had an hour, which was way to short to get deeper into this still open question, but we decided to gather her to continue the conversation!

So voila, here we are :).

Saturday

Permapublishing continued

Can we break down what permapublishing could be?

What are the different points of tension?

- printer, planned obselecense, printer as computer (speaking postscript)

- software issues, ps, pdf, adobe's relation to pdf

- autonomy <> community

dependency/relations

relationships through dependencies

where do you get your paper?

should we make everything from scratch?

outsource/collaborate to paper makers?

networks of solidarity, related to the printer initiative of Yann

workers movement that broke the machines?

women (gleaners) went to the field to pick the seeds in the harvest season

additional jobs that surrounded tasks, multiple people

the machines coming in were a new way of working, you needed a lot of money to have the machines, which was a start of capitalisation

when the (big blade) arrived in the field, there was also pressure against it..

relation to paper: paper was made from scraps of clothes

you had to gather the scraps to make paper out of it

how can we make the most of everything we have? (circularity before circularity as an idea was there)

decentralization these days is: everything is produced in east asia and comes back to europe

if we're trying to be some kind of degree of autonomous, it becomes very difficult

everything that happened in those two centuries, we need to unravel it again

the complexity layers increase, it becomes very difficult

the clothes industry is currently the most poluting industry

but with the current textiles (plastic based) the situation is not the same as 2 centuries ago

it feels like building a city again

ON PAPER

bachelor thesis on paper production

too much plastic and electrics in the fabric

but struggled to print

on paper: some people contextualize paper made from fabrique, cotton,

a book on paper: "NATURAL ENEMIES OF BOOKS"

the paper factory in the netherlands

https://demiddelstemolen.nl/

Q: Oveproduction, the scale, the economy of books, the ones that get sale circulate, the others get destroyed.

speculation on titles to get popular, but many books leave on the shelves

Overproduction vs the importance of knowledge production

On books that are important: they're expensive and stay on people's shelves anyway, so how to have them circulate a bit more, outside of the shops that concentrate on their revenue?

What about the life of the books?

How to keep circulating them?

How to give them the best life?

To make a book sustainable, it has to be read.

lifecycle analysys of the lowtech mag

marie's article:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2025/03/the-compressed-book-edition/

putting the lowtechmagazine book in the library is the most sustainable way to access lowtechmagazine

Is there any way to erase ink from paper?

back in the days, animal skin (leather) was used to write upon

how to do this with non animal material?

there are thermal reaction paper

seasonal books??!

solar panel based website is also seasonal in a way, the website is not up at all times

maybe you can only access books under a certain temperature

but then how many times can you re-layer them

ON SOFTWARE issue

The pdf: a bit heavy compared to a txt file

text-paper-ink

A lot of victor's martin's and arthur's pages are text, they prefer using tools that are more comphortable with text files.

Not in the grand scheme of things, the energy cost in the moment though is it the same - please correct me here, I lost things

"i like to read in vim" -

"vim designing"

Are we actually saving energy costs with this?

maybe the perma-computing sense does not only come in here through saving energy costs but the malleability of a file format that allows you do read/write/edit

reading should be read/write !!

R&W - a dialogue

reading == read/write

a small computer is practical, to read and write on the move. On the text files, the structure is all there, and all there is.

when do you need to ship information with structure?

you are inclined in doing it, because there pleasure in working this way

but css mails are very fun to receive, but in gmail it is a pain, but in mud you can't see anything

friends on tmux review on css mails : can't read

When do I need structure, when can I work on just a text file?

Not wanting to impose this practice onto other people, but it triggers questions

Nice thing about emails is that you can have multiple versions, html, txt, you could have a config to look at the txt version by default and voila (IN THEORY)

LIMITS

In this framework (permacomputing)

where do we draw the line of what is too much, what is radical enough?

do we not send images to each other, because it is enough?

what are the relative situated criteria? should be contextualized and framed from needs

how to formulate limits? and start to make choices?

permaarchiving is a super interesting take here too, what do we keep

very important question of memory, specially in the political context of facism right now

timelines of media

harddrives do not last!

paper is the long term option, backups are important but don't last forever

SSDs are more unstable than HDD, around 8 years for commercial ones.

magnetic tape as a stable option to store data?

the university archivist in Strassbourgh: if you want to loose something, save it digitally

a nice tool to archive on paper :

OPTAR to compress and uncompress (optar/unoptar), it is a qr code, with the data inside it, not linked to data elsewhere.

store data on paper!!! <3

https://github.com/colindean/optar

it would be super fun to make seasonal optar datacenter

SOFTWARE USED TO PRODUCE BOOKS

how can we think of Limits in relation to css print, permapublishing in relationship to css print?

indesign - css print?

In 30 years the files are certain to be readable

can you open indesign files without a license? no

can you read indesign files? yes, but you cannot really change anything

css is declarative, you can read it -human readable

css is readable, if you speak english

standards are meant to stay around, how to think about the friction between taking plain css (a lagnauge formulated by big companies) vs seeing the custom usages that people develop.

Browser: still a big blackbox

As a user you can write into html and css, but how can you write ....

perl, the maker of this language, loves language, re..ability

friction between custom tools vs standards

how to tweak your layout engine?

you should be able to tweak the renders, from shellscripting practices: if you find a way to do a very specific layout in css but it is unpractical, you can make a script that makes the logic for you. But then you loose readability of the css maybe... gaining and loosing.

experiment to publish stylesheets during a declarations workshop in Berlin

published as a wiki page

PUBLISHING OUR STYLESHEET??

there's maybe the connection to permacomputing, also you avoid to have to pass through the inspector all the time

can we mix stylesheets?? 70% prepostprint website, 30% wikipedia

sharing how we use css

make css libraries

ref to classless stylesheets(?)

css zen garden https://csszengarden.com/

css print zen garden when?!? :---)

why the % stylesheets interesting

it makes the styling permeable, because if an external changes

question of energy is one

but question of community is super important

we should not aim for getting rid of depencies

we should aim at relining depencies with our values

HOW TO START?

it is nice to talk but how to practice

There is a new forum on the permacomputing website that we can use, it invonlves appling for an account

https://bbs.permacomputing.net/

LGM (https://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2025/) in Nuremberg in late May, there could be a nice space to continue, there also are more people to continue the conversation, Brendan Howell will be there, also tied to permacomputing, he made "the screenless office".

form : https://framaforms.org/account-request-permacomputing-forum-1743087976

TABLE OF CONTENTS:(of topics we could discuss in the forum)

PAPER

SOFTWARE

PRINTER