Publishing

Over­view

Pub­lish­ing faces a com­bin­a­tion of diverse tech­no­lo­gical chal­lenges: main­tain­ing tra­di­tional chan­nels while devel­op­ing new ones; mon­et­ising the lists effect­ively; man­aging Intel­lec­tual Prop­erty without conflict; and simply try­ing to stay ahead of com­pet­it­ors and cus­tom­ers. XML and its part­ner tech­no­lo­gies are at both the core and the lead­ing edge of these developments.

This course identifies some of the tech­niques and applic­a­tions that can be used. It provides a mix of present­a­tions, case stud­ies, and prac­tical exer­cises to help pub­lish­ers to lever­age more of the intel­lec­tual resources in their domain.

Teach­ers in this course include Fac­ulty mem­bers Jo Rabin, Norm Walsh, Sebastian Rahtz, and Tony Gra­ham, as well as Fac­ulty Board mem­ber Peter Flynn.

Classes for 2012

XML and Pub­lish­ing Workflows

Taught by Tony Graham

Some formats are bet­ter or worse than oth­ers for cap­tur­ing and/or rep­res­ent­ing the inform­a­tion for pub­lish­ing pur­poses. Can you cre­ate and man­age life-cycle work­flows which ration­al­ise or reg­u­lar­ise mixes of formats using XSLT and other XML tool­sets? Should XML be the begin­ning of your pub­lish­ing work­flow, the hub format in the middle, the res­ult, or all three? How can XSLT and related tools be used to cover up the defi­cien­cies or excesses of the source XML? What are the argu­ments for mov­ing authors towards sub­mit­ting in XML (or not)? For mov­ing editors?

Incor­por­at­ing both live examples and war stor­ies, Tony Gra­ham will lead an exam­in­a­tion of XML in pub­lish­ing work­flows, the advant­ages and dis­ad­vant­ages of using XML at each stage, and some of the tools and tech­niques avail­able to you.

Epubs and Wordprocessors

Taught by Sebastian Rahtz

Many people man­age doc­u­ments in struc­tured XML and pro­duce format­ted web pages or print using some kind of trans­form­a­tion. This ses­sion will con­cen­trate on some of the less well-understood tar­gets for format­ted out­put (and some­times input), the word-processor and ebook formats.

Both Open­Of­fice and Microsoft Word doc­u­ment formats are zipped bundles of fairly com­plex XML files, using schemas doc­u­mented and pub­lished as ISO stand­ards. It is pos­sible to both read and write these files using nor­mal XML pro­cessing tools and a little extra management.

The ePub format used in eg Apples iBooks is also a zipped bundle of XML files, con­sist­ing of HTML doc­u­ments, images, styles, and metadata files. There are rigid con­straints on the HTML which is accep­ted, and gen­er­at­ing ePub is slightly more com­plex than mak­ing web pages.

In this ses­sion we will look at the pack­aging formats for Word, Open Office and ePub, and the details of the XML files inside them. We will con­sider some of the tech­niques for con­vert­ing between the office doc­u­ment formats and more semantic XML using stand­ard XML tools (eg XSLT).

Mobile First

Taught by Jo Rabin and Peter Flynn

Use of hand­held devices (tab­lets, phones, and eRead­ers) already exceeds desktop use in many mar­kets, and users expect mater­ial to be in a form they can read across a wide range of devices. What does it take to be ready for this device diversity, and what will we have tomor­row? Sens­ible mobile strategy demands major flex­ib­il­ity at the back end, so what does this mean to pub­lish­ers without presentation-neutral content?

Come back, Cax­ton, all is not yet lost — Does a move away from the print medium mean abandon­ing tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing stand­ards? Does the elec­tronic medium really mean lower stand­ards or should this be an area of com­pet­it­ive advantage?

If one stand­ard is good, then must many be bet­ter? — How should pub­lish­ers choose between formats and can we char­ac­ter­ise formats as good, bad or ugly? In this inter­act­ive work­shop ses­sion we look at what are the desir­able char­ac­ter­ist­ics of pub­lish­ing formats and how to cri­tique them both from a tech­no­logy and a com­mer­cial standpoint.

Agenda for change — Pub­lish­ing is chan­ging fast and has already changed bey­ond recog­ni­tion from only a few years ago. Tech­no­logy is lead­ing this, so what are tech­no­lo­gists’ respons­ib­il­it­ies in inform­ing com­pany dir­ec­tion and how can they be effect­ive in mak­ing their points? Another inter­act­ive work­shop ses­sion about how to move things for­ward purposefully.

Doc­u­ment Management

Taught by Norm Walsh

Hav­ing XML doc­u­ments, the raw mater­i­als of your pub­lic­a­tion pro­cess, is only part of the story. Mod­ern pub­lish­ing envir­on­ments demand reuse and repur­pos­ing of con­tent to max­im­ize its value. That means you need not just XML, but also a vis­ion for how it can be com­bined and trans­formed to deliver new products.

This ses­sion will explore some of the fun­da­mental pieces of that vis­ion includ­ing the abil­ity to describe work­flows that can com­bine and pro­cess con­tent and the chal­lenges and oppor­tun­it­ies afforded by the prom­ise of reusable documents.

We’ll go on to dis­cuss some spe­cific tech­nical tools that you can use to man­age and develop an effect­ive work­flow sys­tem. This will include a review of the role that schemas and val­id­a­tion play in assur­ing a cor­rect pro­duc­tion pro­cess as well as intro­duce some pos­sibly new tools includ­ing XML pipelines.