Publishing doesn't get any easier. Budgets require companies to produce more with less, leaving you stuck in the middle of finding a way to make your workflow more efficient. The Well-Formed Document Workflow provides you that way out of the quagmire of inefficiency.
The Well-Formed Document Workflow puts everyone in your company on the same page with your content—structurally and efficiently.
Well-Formed Workflows
The state of your existing workflow almost entirely predicts the cost of XML conversions. Publishers who are currently working in a well-formed environment (e.g., SGML, XML, etc.) will find the conversion process to be rather inexpensive and seamless. The greater the consistency of your tagging, according to strict rules with rich granularity, the easier the conversions will be.
Imposing Structure
Anyone can impose structure on a manuscript by using Microsoft Word's paragraph and character styles. The first step in the Well-Formed Document Workflow is to import a set of preformatted styles from a Word template into the unformatted Word document. Using these styles, structure can be applied to the content.
The earlier in the process this is done, the better since it allows copyeditors to focus more on improving the content of a manuscript because the structure is imposed before anything else is done. Thus, there is no longer a need to concentrate on both the language and the structure of a manuscript at the same time.
It allows copyeditors to take advantage of Word’s built-in editorial features to check that there is both structural and grammatical consistency throughout a document. And it communicates to the typesetter exactly how elements should be handled.
Since the structure has already been applied to the document, the typesetter can focus on making the design. QuarkXPress and InDesign will maintain the style naming, since there is a one-to-one correspondence between all elements of a publication.
Once typesetting is completed, the styles will become the foundation of your conversion to any other XML or SGML language.
XML Easily
XML is a source file that is intended to communicate data and structure. Since you have already applied the structure to your data, it becomes easy to convert your final files from QuarkXPress or InDesign into the XML language of your choice.
Scribe can write conversion applications for you (in either Perl or most other programming languages) to make the process quicker and less resource intensive. Once you have an XML source document, it becomes easy to convert that XML into other formats, allowing you to multipurpose your content.
Using your Well-Formed Documents as a starting point, you could convert your files to other XML formats and multipurpose the data to publish to databases, e-books, CD-ROMs, PDAs, Web sites, or other formats. This will ensure efficiency, consistency, quality, and cost savings.
Taking Your Content Everywhere
By using the Well-Formed Document Workflow, all publishing processes, from acquisition to distribution, can be coordinated consistently. Publisher backlists will become dynamic, allowing them to be inexpensively repurposed to generate revenue from emerging electronic markets.
XML allows publishers to make distribution decisions based on the appropriateness of the market, not the cost to get there.
For more information on how the Well-Formed Document Workflow is implemented, see our comparison of the Well-Formed Document to XML Workflow.