Taught by Tomos Hillman.

This session addresses the impact of technology on publishing, exploring trends of abstraction, separation of concerns, and profitability. We go on to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of XML in publishing, and explore what this should mean for how we plan our content and workflows.

Taught by Tomos Hillman.

Starting from the general principles established in the introduction, this session compares approaches on capturing the XML content. We’ll take some time to look at quality control, discussing the benefits of technologies like schema and schematron, as well as considering documentation needs. As well as discussing challenges working with external type-setters and capturers, we’ll look at some of the possibilities and pit-falls of authoring directly in XML.

Taught by Norm Walsh.

In this section of the course, we’ll turn our attention to the technology choices available: schema languages, validation technologies, and processing tools. We’ll consider vocabulary concepts: What makes a good schema? Should you build your own or use an existing standard? How do JATS, DocBook, DITA, etc. compare? How can you tell what’s right for your organization? What processing tools are available and how can you leverage them? Should your workflow include Markdown or other non-XML structured markup langauges? How can you leverage linked data in your publishing workflow? We’ll leave time for questions and discussion of the particular challenges facing our delegates.

This session starts after lunch and continues after the break.

Taught by Tony Graham.

CSS can be used for making pages as well as for styling websites. Many people are familiar with CSS in the browser: some are very familiar, but others, not so much. Fewer people, however, are as familiar with using CSS for paged media.

This session takes an eat-your-own-dog-food approach to showing how to use CSS for paged media. Starting with the HTML text of a tutorial on using CSS with paged media, the session will progressively add and explain the CSS styles that are used to format the finished text. By the end of the session, the fairly undifferentiated mass of text will be formatted with running headers and footers, page numbers and page number cross-references, bleeds, CMYK colours, footnotes, top- and bottom-floats, and other features that appear in paged media but not in a browser. The session will also describe accessibility features of PDF.

Because of the comparatively short duration of the session, there is only time to cover the CSS features specific to paged media.

Taught by Tony Graham.

Anyone working with XML and text documents is eventually going to have to format their documents for people to read; XSL-FO and CSS are among the obvious means. This part gives a review of some of the options available to you for producing traditional paged media or book-like output, and how it can be managed alongside non-paged editions of the documents. The presentation includes a review of the current state of XSL-FO, CSS, and EPUB as well as the specific supports available for TEI, DocBook, JATS, and DITA.

Taught by Nic Gibson.

Differing XML models provide differing semantic models. Publishers’ content will match some models better than others. We will examine the semantic depth of common models such as JATS, DocBook, and (X)HTML and look at how differing content can be modelled with XML. We will look at lessons we have learned as XML based publishing has become part of the mainstream of the publishing industry. We will at successful XML implementations and at consider mistakes that have been made (and how we can avoid them). We’ll particularly consider the idea that every publisher needs their own schema and why this is almost always a mistake. We will consider how metadata can be used for bibliographic and for marketing purposes and how metadata standards can be used to improve the quality of content when we are publishing to multiple output channels.

This session starts after lunch and continues after the break.