The DAISY Pipeline 2 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 a specific disability.
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, which is becoming 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 restictions 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 2 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 DAISY Pipeline 2 project is the follow-up of the original DAISY Pipeline (now 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), version 2 of the project aims to
Because a lot of organisations still rely on some Pipeline 1 converters in their production today, we are currently working on making these legacy converters available through the DAISY Pipeline 2 user and programming interfaces, in order to make the transition to Pipeline 2 smoother and to retire the Pipeline 1 user interface.