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.
Continue reading "The XML trenches: Part One" »
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.
Continue reading "IGP:FLIP Major New Feature Round-up" »
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.
Continue reading "Building FX Tagging Patterns" »