Publishing with XML

The XML trenches: Part One

We generally work with publishers who need real, long-term, digital content strategies for real business objectives; rather than just producing e-pubs and mobi files for Kindle. Infogrid Pacific is more of a publisher "Digital Content Strategy Boutique" than a BPO data-processing warehouse. We don't touch bulk BPO data-processing type work as there are plenty of providers around for that stuff. 

We are digital-content journey-men who do not claim to have seen it all, but sure have seen a lot! The XML Trenches series is designed to use real world stories to assist those putting their toes in the XML waters to learn from experience. For obvious reasons I cannot use company and people's names.

We had a 2004 ArbourText machine generated XML textbook sent to us by a North American textbook major for processing back to a facsimile of the original book. From what we understand it was sent to a number of Indian digitization facilities-a competitive thingy. Normally we don't participate in those, but the job was somewhat interesting. 

IGP:FLIP available as SaaS Model

Well we have finally reached the point where IGP:FLIP can be (and should be) released as a SaaS model, so it has been.

Sunday the 4th April 2010 is the day. Any Publisher of any size can now take advantage of all the features of the most powerful XML digital production system available anywhere today from just US$99.00 per month. Thats:

INR 4,450.00
UKP 65.00
Euro 74.00
AUD 110.00
NZD 140.00
SGD 140.00

For more information go to IGP:FLIP Publisher Portals, and start your XML digital content for the future strategy instantly, and affordably.

IGP:FLIP Major New Feature Round-up

Rust never sleeps, nor does the IGP:FLIP development team apparently.

The single, biggest most exciting addition is IGP:Document Designer; an online interactive book design tool. One of the problems with XML template driven content is the lack of flexibility in output for various formats. IGP:Document Designer removes all of these constraints and barriers.

Now only a single standard interactively modified template is used and applied to books independently. The entire layout of a book can be set-up from page size to drop-caps. To create a complete custom designed book can take just a few hours, changes can be made instantly, and outputs are always available during the design process. Click the image for a larger view.

But that is not all. IGP:FLIP now supports a new Font Manager, Media Manager and multiple-PDF profiles from the same IGP:FoundationXHTML document. IGP:FLIP also supports PDF Design Profiles. That means you can have more than one (any number) of PDF designs instantly available from the one XML file. It stores as many design and tracking profiles as you need. That means you can have the standard trade book and an oversize print book created more or less at the same time. And it still outputs multiple e-book formats. 

Building FX Tagging Patterns

As dicussed earlier, IGP:FoundationXHTML (FX) tagging patterns at least acknowledge the concepts of Microformats (Wikipedia, Home page), it's not quite the same because it's much more than just metadata, and because of the much larger range of content fragment genres that need to be addressed to cover the widest range of publisher content.

In quick summary, Microformats are designed for humans first and machines second and are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviours and usage patterns. The following list has been lifted from and adapted from the Microformat web site.