Working with IGP:Digital Publisher

Topic Overview

This topic explains some of the ways you can use IGP:Digital Publisher to create multi-format documents instantly from a collaboration environment.

1. Collaboration
2. Not full WYSIWIG
3. Not a Web CMS
4. Product usage scenarios
5. Front List Publishing
6. Remix Publishing
7. Covers
8. The Frontlist Publishing Roles

Collaboration

1. IGP:Digital Publisher has been designed for organizations of all sizes to empower multi-role, multi-location, collaborative publishing of the widest range and variety of documents in multiple formats simultaneously.
2. With IGP:Digital Publisher a document never moves and can be accessed by anybody (meaning an authorized user) from anywhere, at any time. That "anybody", can see the current state of a document in any format, instantly, at any time.
3. IGP:Digital Publisher can be easily and effectively used by a single person to create sophisticated documents. It is probably easier to learn and use than a word processor, and it retains all the familiar user interface components with which people are familiar.
4. IGP:Digital Publisher can be easily and effectively used by a large multi-function team carrying out different roles and working on different sections of the document at the same time.

Not full WYSIWIG

1. The IGP:Writer component, where the authoring, editing and layout are done, is not not a WYSIWIG environment. It's a What You See is What You Mean, interface. The reason for this is there is no one format that is a correct view. You can be creating multiple output formats including Online, eBooks and SCORM packages; reflowing and reusing content, and many other practical uses. Therefore, there is no correct WYSIWIG environment.
2. It is NOT a word processor, although the primary text editing tools look and act in a similar manner. It is an XHTML editing  and format flow environment. This can be a little disturbing for people who work with Word processor binary formats. IGP:Digital Publisher uses W3C standard XHTML so there is no proprietary binary format, just editing to output formats.

Not a Web CMS

1. IGP:Digital Publisher is not a Web Content Management System CMS (W-CMS) in any respect. A Web Content Management System is optimized for authoring and maintaining content on dynamic websites. While it can be used as a Web CMS - for example the Infogrid Pacific Website pages are delivered from an IGP:Digital Publisher installation - it doesn't do that job particularly elegantly.
2. The content of any IGP:Digital Publisher:Reader page can be delivered as a mash-up into any other site; as a fragment, or full XHTML page, with, or without CSS. This means more sophisticated documents can be maintained for Online access from a more suitable editorial environment, and delivered when and where required. Examples of where IGP:Digital Publishercan enhance or better Web CMS products is the low cost and ease with which complex education, training and learning packages can be created, maintained and published to the Internet.

Product usage scenarios

Front list publishing

1. IGP:Digital Publisher brings significant production productivity advantages for nearly any type of book or document, while always retaining powerful content reuse, online  and format publishing  features.
2. Using IGP:Digital Publisher for front list publishing requires a cultural change if it is to be effective. An organization must assess whether it has the change management temperament to  take advantage of the new work methodologies.
3. IGP:Digital Publisher has not really been designed for casual documentation although the powerful remix functions do allow note-taking and memo type techniques. It is very effectively for fast authoring and revision of valuable maintained content - such as this manual.
4. It shines when used in a environment where planning, coordination and control are in place. Then the quality, productivity and controlled freedom benefits are very large and immediate. Whether the composition and flow of a document is done in-house, or by a contractor working from off-site, the core control stays with the publisher.

Remix republishing

1. IGP:Digital Publisher is designed to allow content to be reused, and it makes it very easy to bring different content items together from different sources for a wide variety of purposes. A significant application is localization (not translation), where selected locale contextual content replaces source content, and date, time, currency and other locale items are modified.
2. Ideally the content is correctly tagged using IGP:FoundationXHTML. This makes it immediately ready for a wide range of reuse options without extensive styling and layout work.
3. Content object publishing & reuse
4. Enterprises of all types are moving more to Topic based authoring where it is suitable. This immediately makes content  long-term, high-value assets.
5. Topic based content is currently dominated by DITA and SCORM to ensure interoperability but these two frameworks are specific to technical text and training text. It  is difficult and expensive to fit to use them for a wide variety of document types.
6. IGP:FoundationXHTML in conjunction with IGP:ACOM brings most of the same benefits of content objects, without the technology overheads.

Reader Subscription Access

1. Subscription content means making content available to controlled users on a controlled basis through an Online Reader. IGP:Digital Publisher has an Online Reader built right in to make it easy to publish content onto the Internet. In fact this feature is running all the time.
2. Front List Publishing
3. The immediate benefits gained by using IGP:Digital Publisher for front list publishing are:
4. Dramatically shorten publishing times
5. The production output is valuable and ready for:
   1. Print production
   2. Online Publishing
   3. eBook and other format generation
   4. Content Object  creation
      1. without any further processing. And with additional editorial inputs.
      2. Multiple variant localization
6. New business models are opened
7. Manuscript preparation
   1. Manuscripts are generally provided to publishers as MS Word documents. There is little automation possible between MS Word (or any other word-processor input) and the system. What can be done is manuscripts can be styled with IGP:Digital Publisher template styles and imported. Any general applied Word styles are stripped off and the basic HTML structures are imported. If you are preparing manuscripts for import into RW don't spend too much time overstyling them.
8. Editorial processes
   1. Copy and proof editing can be carried out directly Online by any participant. All changes are recorded in the revision tree, and saved versions can be compared at any time. There is no need for a separate markup process. However if the house work method is for markup history to be maintained, once imported the manuscript can be published and editors can do their markup in IGP:Digital Publisher:Reader using annotations.
   2. Of course there is nothing to stop historical PDF markup processes being carried out. It is easy to create special wide-margin versions to allow PDF annotation or print and annotate, and PDF's can be produced by page (Chapter / Topic / Article) or as the entire document.
9. Design, flow and extent control
   1. IGP:Digital Publisher uses flow rendering engines to replace typesetting applications. The main advantage of this approach is a document can be seen in its final form at any time, and within limits, multiple participants can work on different parts of the same document significantly reducing time to market. Remember, the document never moves.
   2. There are a lot of aspects to flow control and in a high-volume, high-quality production system the issues that are taken into account are:
      1. Character and word kerning
      2. Line turns and hyphenation
      3. Paragraph turns
      4. Page turns with Widow/Orphans
      5. Chapter ends and turns – page line count and last line character count.
      6. Page extent control
      7. Page float controlled content objects and their relationship with the galley (figures, images, illustrations, tables, etc.)

Generated Content

1. Generated content completes any sophisticated document for any purpose. IGP:Digital Publisher allows multi-format generated content strategies with the subtleties and variations required to support print, online and multiple e-book formats.
2. Generated text (running headers, tables of content, Glossaries, indexes, etc.)
3. Notes and footnotes positioning, processing and numbering, with different strategies for different documents.
4. Inserted text (templated advertising pages, etc.)

Covers

1. IGP:Digital Publisher is possibly not the ideal place to create covers and for single books probably does not bring productivity benefits. However if you are using standard templated covers, with SVG generated, or block positioned XHTML text, it can  be highly effective.
2. The application creates and inserts ISBN barcode blocks as standard and can generate front, front plus back and a full spine calculated perfect binding covers at least to Print on Demand (POD) quality. You have to provide the ISBN's of course.

The Frontlist Publishing Roles

1. Depending on the organization and how IGP:Digital Publisher is used, some combination of the following roles is required to get the best from the production environment. These are roles and depending on the organization and project, can be carried out by one person, or a multi-function, multi-location team.
2. Project Manager. The Project Manager is usually (or ideally) the document owner and activity coordinator when there are multiple participants, multiple document production stages, and multiple document parts or types. The document owner has the full control over who can access and modify the document.
3. Authors, reviewers and Authorizers. Sophisticated revision management allows organizations to apply formal review and authorization processes to every IGP:Digital Publisher page of a document. In addition both IGP:Digital Publisher and IGP:Digital Publisher:Readerallow notes and comments to be added directly into the content at appropriate points. These can be stripped out at any time. They are always stripped out when any type of format is produced so they never appear in output documents.
4. Manuscript Editors and Copy Editors. Once imported into IGP:Digital Publisher manuscripts can be immediately seen in the output formats in the IGP:Reader online View, or as a Preview PDF. This is a unique advantage of the tool. While the production environment is optimized for production, the finished output is only a single click away at any time. Text can be changed instantly from the editing interface and the results seen in any required output format. The edit revision tree maintains a complete list of minor, draft, edit or revision changes so all document modifications, and who made them can be seen at any time. Annotations can be applied directly into the bodytext.
5. Metadata Editors. This is probably a sub-role of Copy Editors, but depending on the publication type and purpose, may have independent responsibilities. Metadata can be applied at the document level, but in addition, each section (chapter) can have independent metadata if it is going to be reused for a Content Object strategy. By default IGP:Digital Publisher supports descriptive, pedagogical, rights, and functional metadata. Metadata can be modified and customized for any additional or different requirements.
6. Indexers. Indexers can work in a number of ways. The most direct is to put index markers directly into the text. The Index field markup will be visible in the Writer view. Direct index items will be generated when the print PDF is made, or for other formats when the document is processed through the Publish Manager toolkit. This can of course happen at any time.  If an Indexer has a target page extent for the index they can view this by generating the book PDF at any time.
7. Template Designers. Books can be purely template driven, in which case the template is pre-defined and used without modification; or templates can be changed and extended as the book progresses. IGP:Digital Publisher gives designers control over the smallest issues, important for more sophisticated layouts such as text books. Template designers can start with one of the basic designs and modify it as required, or create their own designs following the templating rules. Templates can be changed right up to the last minute, because it takes just a few seconds to generate the final print PDF.
8. Graphic Artists. Every image placed into a document comes with a default positional image. Graphic artists work with their normal tools and create images and upload them to the components directories. They can replace positionals with a single click. Images need to be created in both Online and Print resolution using the Image guidelines.
9. STM Editors. Where books contain maths, chemistry notation or similar there are two approaches that can be taken. The items can be prepared as images and inserted, or MML+SVG can be used.
10. XML Flow Editors, Compositors. XML flow editing is a new role, but on large and complex books with multiple participants is possibly a required skill set. When books require image floating and flow controls, it is fastest and probably generates the best quality output if a specialist focuses on the task. As various participants edit and change content, because the content is being prepared in an HTML editor, there is a chance that things may not be XHTML perfect. Sometimes repairs require switching to source mode and tracking down an inconsistency. This is not everybody's idea of a good time, so it is probably best left to someone who understands and enjoys it.