Publishing with XML

Currently working on the release of IGP:FLIP Portals, bringing advanced digital content strategies to small and medium publishers

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.

XML Flashcards in IGP:FLIP

We have just been through a small in-house publishing project where the layout capabilities of XHTML and CSS for print was fully exploited. We are in the process of adding 150 new production editors and they have to be fully trained in image processing, proofing and XML production in just a few weeks. It's a pressure-cooker course.

We have our own highly optimized production tools for all aspects of digitization work so the steep learning curves associated with third party desktop applications is removed. But the production teams still have to all be able to talk with the same quality vocabulary, and instantly analyse books, magazines and other content into various structures for processing in IGP:FLIP and production to print, e-books and channel delivered content.

It was essential that the learning process and training outcomes could be quantified. One of the main learning and evaluation tools we decided to use for the knowledge aspects of this program was Flashcards. Good old fashioned printed ones so they can be taken home and used anywhere any time.

We needed to make a lot of Flashcards very fast. They had to be authored, reviewed, and fully pilot tested before going live with users.  Creating a lot of flashcard sets is a big undertaking and very detailed work. To the rescue - XHTML and the new CSS-3 box-sizing: border-box in IGP:FLIP.

For those who don't know what box-sizing does, you can read a bit more here. The important point is that Firefox, Safari and PrinceXML all support this powerful CSS feature.

Publishing XML is Tagging Patterns

Things are picking up apace in 2010 and the blog is constantly nagging me for being negligent.

IGP:FLIP allows the importing and conversion to FoundationXHTML of a wide range of formats including word-processor files, spreadsheets, presentations, text and other items. The text and structure aspects of the content are imported substantially intact.What goes missing is the original style information.

We constantly get asked "Why can't IGP:FLIP import XML?" Well of course it can, but not through the general office formats importer. XML is not a format. It is an encoding standard that lets anyone use agreed vocabularies to define machine to machine data interchange. A specific XML schema or DTD is getting close to being a format, but is usually a long way from being usable except in an opaque XML editing or processing environment.

IGP:FLIP in 2010

IGP:FLIP, the Infogrid Pacific multi-format XML production environment has gone through a massive feature update. Some of these have been against the impending release of IGP:Document Designer, the new interactive book/template design toolkit.  

Sustainable XML Strategies

The main problem with any potential content XML strategy is... which or what XML DTD or schema to use. This decision affects all publishers including corporate, institutional and government.

As part of the "which XML" decision making, you no longer have to think about what you want to do with your content in the future. Right now if you are not wanting your content ready for absolutely anything and everything you shouldn't be thinking XML. Ready for everything means at least all of the following:

XHTML Strategies. Structures, Titles and Headers

We see and repair a lot of e-book files, especially OEB and XML first files that have been created by various digitization/production houses around the world and over the years. Somewhere along the road we appear to have become an e-book repair shop of last resort - sort of a "Pimp My e-book" where hopeless cases get rebuilt from the ground up. In 2008-9 we repaired and reprocessed around 2.7M pages for various publishers - mostly OEB, and a fair amount of miscellaneous XML. A record year, but maybe an indicator of the developing e-book market.

One of the most interesting features in re-processing so much of other peoples XML work is the lack of future value implicit in the core XHTML. There is usually a cloud of CSS style statements that are no more than presentation instructions and many weird and not-wonderful structures. There is never a need for <p class="bodytext">  or "btext" or whatever else your house style is, why not let <p> just do its work and only use class statements when <p> really needs to be overloaded.