Edit once, publish everywhere

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Sept 1, 2003 by Hal Hinderliter

Byline: Hal Hinderliter

For magazine publishers, the World Wide Web inspired vast new online empires. But it has also turned out to be a great marketing tool and - for an increasing number of magazine brands - a source of modest, but welcome, revenue growth (see Folio:, July 2003). Everyone needs a Web site, and most periodicals have placed some or all of their content online. As a result, publishing to the Web in a timely, cost-effective manner has been a topic of great concern for publishers and their production departments.

Creating Portable Document Format (PDF) files from your page layout document is one solution, but most Web-surfing consumers would rather browse through individual Web pages than download a single PDF of an entire magazine issue. More important, the repurposed print pages are an economic drag: Print advertisers get a free ride, and the magazine loses the chance to sell online ads. That's not an acceptable option!

Today the alternative for most magazines is to use the labor-intensive cut-and-paste process of converting print-specific documents (Quark, Pagemaker, and InDesign files) into a series of linked Web pages. This method requires that each text box of digital documents used to generate the printing plates must be selected, copied, then pasted into hypertext markup language (HTML) using templates created with programs such as Macromedia's Dreamweaver or Adobe's GoLive. Of course, the formatting (typeface, font size, alignment, etc.) that works so well in the page layout application may now produce an ugly Web page, which in turn leads to hours of reformatting and tweaking. Eventually, the same content and illustrations that appear in the print publication will be delivered to the Web, but this inefficient process means the Web site may appear days after the print version has already reached readers - and at considerable cost.

The need to simplify the process of "webbifying" magazine content grows more critical as the number of delivery channels multiplies. Depending on your product, you may want to deliver versions of your magazine's pages to cellular phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). Have you thought about making your Web-based publication accessible to the screen-reading software used by the visually impaired? What about an e-mail blast containing short article abstracts to lure readers back to your newly posted content?

These opportunities are being addressed by the new generation of Extensible Markup Language (XML) publishing tools that promise to ease the delivery of a single publication over multiple formats. XML publishing also offers the allure of a dynamic workflow in which data is no longer entombed in a static desktop publishing document, but is instead stored separately from its print or Web layout vehicles. Because of the ability to generate documents quickly by pulling together XML database entries, it is expected that both advertising and editorial deadlines will be open longer, as documents are generated on-the-fly by pulling together XML database entries.

Like the HTML programming language used to display content in a web browser, XML is also a programming language based on the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) specifications. The key difference is that HTML is a standardized method of displaying formatted data in a Web browser, while XML avoids format information in favor of maximizing its broad usefulness within a variety of applications. The extensible nature of XML means that anyone can create their own customized version of this language, provided these customizations are properly defined so that other systems can understand them. The graphic communications industry is already adopting its own customized extensions to the XML specification. These include AdsML, a new XML subset used for exchange of newspaper advertisements, and Personalized Print Markup Language (PPML), which provides a standardized method to send personalized data to digital printing presses. Standardization of these and other XML-derived languages is allowing content to be shared reliably across multiple printshops and creative agencies.

When it comes to the practical aspects of using XML today, there are essentially two options for simultaneously printing your publication on paper and posting it online: utilize an industrial-strength solution from an established vendor (such as Arbortext or XyEnterprise), or create an ad-hoc XML workflow from a variety of affordable tools. Although the one-source solution provides the greatest accessibility, many publishers are keen on exploiting the new XML capabilities of their current tools, including Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress.

These homegrown solutions have the advantage of maintaining your existing print production workflow. Completed pages are exported as a single XML file, which is then used to produce both printing plates and Web pages. The tricky part of the process is ensuring that each headline, caption, and story is given its own unique XML tag. The use of tags means that each component can be easily formatted during conversion to HTML Web pages, e-books, or other digital media. Such changes can be carried out by Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) rules, which are great for applying a specific stylistic treatment to every heading or footnote. However, some inexpensive tools are not capable of preserving in-line formatting (boldface, italics, etc.) used to emphasize specific words or phrases, leading to manual intervention.