Bloom is an award winning software solution to the children's book shortage among most of the world's languages. It is an application for Windows and Linux that dramatically "lowers the bar" for creating, translating, and sharing books. With Bloom, communities can do the work for themselves instead of depending on outsiders. For more information, see https://bloomlibrary.org/about. For user documentation, see https://docs.bloomlibrary.org.
Internally, Bloom is a hybrid. It started as a C#/WinForms app with an embedded browser for editing documents and an embedded Adobe Acrobat for displaying PDF outputs. It is growing up to be a pure React-driven offline-capable web app, with a C# backend. In its current state, Bloom is hybrid of C#/web app in which the bits of the UI are gradually moving to html.
- Install C# dependencies
./build/getDependencies-windows.sh-
Install volta globally on your computer. This will provide you with the correct node and yarn.
-
Install browser code dependencies:
cd src/content
yarn
cd ../BloomBrowserUI
yarn- In
/src/BloomBrowserUI, runyarn build.
- Open Bloom.sln in Visual Studio
- Build the "WebView2PdfMaker" project
- Run the "BloomExe" project
We don't want developer and tester runs (and crashes) polluting our statistics. On Windows, add the environment variable "feedback" with value "off".
In a terminal, run dotnet tool restore. This will install any tools we have put in .config/dotnet-tools.json along with the correct versions.
In Visual Studio, under Extensions, install "CSharpier". The extension's version will not be the same as the CSharpier installed by 'dotnet tool restore', but that's not a problem.
In Tools/Options, under CSharpier:General, set Reformat with CSharpier on Save to true. Note that you should set it for this solution, not globally.
You should also install the CSharpier extension in vscode.
CSharpier should be using the version specified in .config/dotnet-tools.json.
When testing a new version of CSharpier, to format everything, run dotnet csharpier src/BloomExe
To hide reformatting-only commits from git blame, add the sha of the commit to .git-blame-ignore-revs
For Typescript formatting, we use the Prettier extension in VCode.
To rebuild on typescript changes, use yarn watchCode.
To rebuild less and other "content" on changes, see the various scripts in src/content's package.json.
Hold down CTRL as you launch Bloom.
We use YouTrack Kanban boards. Errors (via email or api) also flow into YouTrack, and we do some support from there by @mentioning users.
Each time code is checked in, an automatic build begins on our TeamCity build server, running all the unit tests. Similarly, when there is a new version of some Bloom dependency (e.g. bloom-player), that server automatically rebuilds and publishes Bloom Alpha. Public channels are released by pressing a button on the TeamCity page. This "publish" process builds Bloom, runs tests, makes an installer, uploads it to S3, and writes out a little bit of json which the Bloom download page uses to display version-specific information to the user.
5.4 is the last version for Linux until we get rid of WinForms.
See the Version5.4 branch and ReadMe if you need to update it.
See this page for how to run it.
UI localization happens on Crowdin.
One responsibility of Bloom desktop is to handle url's starting with "bloom://"", such as those used on bloomlibrary.org when the user clicks "Translate into your language!" Making this work requires some registry settings. These are automatically created when you run Bloom. If you have multiple versions installed, just make sure that the one you ran most recently is the one you want to do the download.
Bloom is open source, using the MIT License. It is Copyright SIL Global. "Bloom" is a registered trademark of SIL Global.