Kate (糧), a stitch-bound book

Kate (『糧』, "nourishment") is the first book in his library at chaipat.cc: a stitch-bound book of his life in eight small books. It keeps the summer of 2025, when he left Chiang Mai for joint research at JAIST in Ishikawa, in photographs of small things, with a little about work.

The eight small books

It closes with an envoi that sends the reader back outside.

How it reads

On a wide screen it is an open book, read from right to left as a Japanese book is. The pages behave like soft paper: a lower corner lifts when the pointer rests on it, and a page can be dragged over, clicked, scrolled, swiped or turned with the arrow keys. Coloured tabs along the top jump to a chapter, and any photograph opens large in a gallery view. A narrow screen shows one page at a time and turns the same way.

The book opens in Japanese, with the chapter text set vertically, and switches to English with one button. The photographs are shown in full colour, on pages laid out like an old-fashioned book.

How it is built

Every page is a fixed sheet of 600 × 840, and the whole book is scaled to fit the window. The words and the caption of every photograph live in one text file, in both languages, and a Python script builds the pages from it. The page turns are plain JavaScript and CSS, and photographs load as the reader approaches their chapter.

The title, like the idea of the whole library, comes from the Japanese edition of André Gide's Les Nourritures terrestres (『地の糧』).

See also

• The library
• The Invisible and Nenrin (年輪), a picture scroll, the other books
• Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST)

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id:Kate
    a cj:Project ;
    rdfs:label "Kate (糧), a stitch-bound book" ;
    cj:shortLabel "Kate" ;
    skos:altLabel "糧" , "Kate book" ;
    cj:context id:ChaipatCC ;
    cj:kind "book" ;
    cj:theme id:ThemeWriting ;
    cj:relatedTo id:Library ;
    cj:uses id:JavaScript , id:HTMLCSS , id:Python ;
    cj:url "https://chaipat.cc/kate"^^xsd:anyURI ;
    cj:liveUrl "https://chaipat.cc/kate"^^xsd:anyURI ;
    cj:description "The first book in the library: a stitch-bound book of his life in eight small books, about a season in Ishikawa in photographs, with a little about work. It is read right to left, with soft pages that turn, in Japanese or English." ;
    cj:tier 2 ;
    cj:mentions id:JAIST ,
                id:Nenrin ,
                id:RoleJAIST ,
                id:TheInvisible ;
    cj:article "https://ask.chaipat.cc/wiki/Kate"^^xsd:anyURI .