Pad-to-Print is a publishing workflow that transforms documents collaboratively written (pads) in Etherpad into print or digital publications. Developed gradually within the Constant, Open Source Publishing (OSP), and Varia communities and by their collaborators, it explores how a real-time collaborative writing tool can become the direct source of a publication, without going through successive stages of copying, formatting, or rewriting.

Rather than treating Etherpad as a simple note-taking space, Pad-to-Print makes the pad itself the primary editorial document. Discussions, annotations, revisions, and various contributions remain at the heart of the publishing process. This approach builds on the practices of workshops, booksprints, and collective writing that have been developed over many years within the free software and web-to-print communities.

The principle of the editorial pipeline is to retrieve content from one or more pads, transform it into an intermediate format suitable for publication, perform layout, and then generate various output formats according to the project’s needs. Unlike a single, standardized pipeline, Pad-to-Print has evolved into a family of tools, scripts, and experiments tailored to each publication.

The various iterations of the project have explored several technical approaches. Some rely on Bash scripts to automatically retrieve content from pads and integrate it into a publishing pipeline using Pandoc, LaTeX, or Scribus. Others use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to directly produce web-to-print publications, while more recent developments rely on ReportLab or LibreOffice to generate printable documents. This diversity reflects the desire to treat tools as interchangeable components rather than as the central elements of the publishing workflow.

One of the first tools developed with this in mind is Ethertoff (2012), designed by Open Source Publishing (OSP). It allows users to export content from an Etherpad into various formats usable in publishing workflows, paving the way for a first generation of experiments in which the pad directly serves as the source for a book or a web publication. Subsequently, other tools, such as padatrad (2019), extended this approach to collaborative translation contexts, while new developments sought to go beyond simple export to support the editorial organization of publications composed of multiple pads.

This evolution is particularly evident in Octomode (2022), developed by Varia. More than just a conversion tool, Octomode provides an environment for composing a publication from a set of Etherpad pads. It facilitates the assembly, sequencing, and synchronization of texts from different pads while maintaining a link to the original collaborative documents. The publication is no longer produced from a single document, but from a network of living texts that can continue to evolve throughout the editorial process. Octomode thus extends the principles of Pad-to-Print by making the pad not only a source of content, but also a unit of composition within a collaborative editorial workflow.

Pad-to-Print has evolved through a series of publications, each of which has contributed to enriching this practice. Are You Being Served (2014) was one of the first experiments to use Ethertoff to produce a web-to-print publication from Etherpad. Conversations (2015) develops a more complex editorial workflow combining Etherpad with a set of open-source tools for transformation, typesetting, and PDF generation. The Techno-Galactic Guide to Software Observation (2016) continues this exploration by further automating the retrieval and transformation of Etherpad documents. Iterations (2020) demonstrates that a book can be produced almost entirely through a collaborative writing process in Etherpad.

Beyond its various technical implementations, Pad-to-Print offers an alternative way of thinking about collaborative publishing. Rather than distinguishing between the phases of writing, editing, and publishing, it views writing as a continuous process in which publication is just one step among many. Pads are no longer merely preparatory workspaces but become editorial objects in their own right, whose forms can evolve and circulate across different media.

Pad-to-Print refers to a family of editorial workflows based on real-time collaborative writing. Its various iterations reflect an ongoing effort to link collective writing practices with open and experimental publishing tools, while preserving the flexibility, openness, and process-oriented nature inherent in shared documents.