Rich Text Wordpress Theme

Rich Text Press (RT Press) is a free, open-source WordPress theme for publishing zines, novels, anthologies and any other type of book or site, funded by the Ontario Arts Council. When you press print, the theme turns your website into a print-ready publication with an index and page numbers, automatically compiling content hyperlinks into a QR code bibliography and publishing credits.

The theme prioritises rich text format content, text and image, aiming for a book-like reading experience on desktop and mobile. Five classic desktop publishing fonts are featured: Times New Roman, Arial, Impact, Courier and Vivaldi, selected from an era of digital fonts that promised users the individual freedom to typeset. The tool supports collective publishing through WordPress's standard user types, enabling authors, editors and administrators to publish together.

RT Press is homemade, do-it-yourself publishing software built against the scrolling streams of today's aggressive algorithmic platforms. Available on Metalabel, Rich Text invites work that subverts algorithmic rankings, including slutty superstitious fan-fictions, gay gossip and other creative and criminal clickbait that seduces platform users toward the more counter-cultural crevices of the world wide web.

Contributions in the Inaugural edition trace how formatting tools, hypertext, desktop publishing and interface design have both liberated and constrained expression, revealing rich text formatting as a site of resistance where users wield boldface, italics, links and raw code to reclaim autonomy. By sliding between the gaps in code, between human and machine, Rich Text questions whether software that promises ease and access actually narrows imaginative and political possibilities.