The DAISY Pipeline is an open-source, cross-platform framework and user interface for the automated processing of digital content in and between various file formats. It intends to facilitate the production and maintenance of accessible content for people with print disabilities.
The Pipeline was developed by and for the DAISY community, a group of organizations committed to making content accessible. It goes without saying that accessiblity is the main interest of the tool. There are Pipeline transformation for migrating from one accessible format to another, enriching an input format with certain accessible features, and producing formats targeting specific disability reading systems.
Accessibility goes hand in hand with standards. Notable file formats that DAISY Pipeline evolves around are EPUB, DAISY, PEF and eBraille.
Standards are also important under the hood. The system is based on standard XML processing technologies, notably W3C recommendations like XProc and XSLT 3.0, but also XPath 3.1, OASIS XML Catalogs, etc. These technologies are platform neutral, supported by active communities, and easy to maintain.
The application can be run in some form on all common operating systems. A desktop application is provided for Windows and macOS. In addition, for Windows users, there is the Save As DAISY addin for MS Word, a DAISY Pipeline user interface specifically for processing Word documents.
DAISY Pipeline also has programming interfaces. When run as a daemon (web server), there are no restrictions. The server can be run on any OS, and its platform neutral RESTful API allows it to be called from any programming language and makes it interoperable with heterogenous production workflows. A command-line interface is available too. When used as a Java library, there are no OS restrictions either.
The system was designed with a modular architecture. Modularity is the key to a better scalability and extensibility.
The project is led and maintained by the DAISY Consortium and involves several member organizations. This reduces the duplication of effort and ensures maximum sharing of best practices among the user community.
All software products maintained by the DAISY Consortium are available under a business-friendly licence (LGPL). This in order to stimulate collaboration between organizations and to maximize reuse and integration in other contexts, including commercial software.
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Download the latest version of DAISY Pipeline and find out how it works.
The DAISY Pipeline is a collaborative project maintained by the DAISY Consortium, with numerous organizations participating and contributing to the development. The “Pipeline 2” project is the follow-up of the original DAISY Pipeline (sometimes referred to as “Pipeline 1”) project.
The initial DAISY Pipeline project was started in 2006. Since then, new standards and technologies have emerged and have been embraced in a total redesign of the DAISY Pipeline framework.
The overarching principles remain the same:
By adopting modern standards (and off-the-shelf implementations of those standards), the “Pipeline 2” project aims to
The current version of DAISY Pipeline is feature complete and production grade software. The legacy version is not maintained and not recommended anymore. Users of the legacy version are advised to update to the current version if possible. Organisations that rely on legacy converters that are not available in the current version, are asked to let us know, and we will make sure these converters are ported.