When Automated Publishing is Not Enough

Reprinted with permission, from issue 17 of the Arbortext XML Publishing Network .

Automation saves labor, collapses production time and improves quality�that�s why we�re so enthusiastic about applying automation to the sometimes dreary and always labor-intensive job of publishing.

Some may mourn the loss of the �human touch� of hand-crafting individual pages, but for most types of documents, we say good riddance: the extra benefit, which is typically apparent only to the author, is simply not worth the extra cost.

In some cases, however, the extra benefit is worth the extra cost. In this article, we discuss those cases where the human touch fulfills a legitimate business need, how we can minimize such cases, and how to gain most of the benefits of automation while also allowing for the possibility of a human touch.

During the discussion that follows, you will also see what motivated Arbortext to make its recent acquisition of Advent3B2.

Publishing with a Human Touch

For a broad range of documents, current publishing automation software performs well enough. For example, software can automatically lay out pages for technical manuals with all of the design features that such documents require. And it can select appropriate page breaks by balancing page fullness with the need to keep related elements together.

Sometimes authors don�t care for the results of automated page layouts. In nearly all cases, however, their issues arise from pride of craftsmanship. While an individual author could adjust spacing, position and even wording, their extra attention to detail will go unnoticed by the information consumers. People who use manuals only want their information to be correct, complete and accessible.

What do you say to an author who resents the loss of formatting control and still wants to influence the layout? The advice from one of our cleverest customers: �Be creative elsewhere.� In other words, focus on the content�everything else is vanity.

But in some situations, there are perfectly legitimate business reasons to give an author or an editor the capability to control page layout:

Reducing printing costs: Because high-quality books are printed in increments of 4 to 16 pages (those increments are called �signatures�), reducing page count by just a single page can save a lot of cost. An automated publishing application cannot minimize page count as well as a human could because a human can make decisions about layout and content that would be difficult or impossible to set up programmatically.
Improving communications: Adjusting the design of a page to improve its ability to convey information to the reader may add enough value to justify the cost of human involvement. But as much as we strained to come up with an example, we could not. So beware: �improving communication� may often be just an excuse.
Improving sales: Some types of books depend as much on design as on content to attract buyers. For example, textbooks buyers are heavily influenced by the beauty of a textbook as well as how well its content complies with their requirements. While automated publishing can deliver page layouts that many textbook publishers would find surprisingly good, the result may not always be good enough.

Given the overwhelming benefits of automation, vendors of automated publishing software such as Arbortext continuously strive to expand their capabilities to bring the benefits of automation to more and more types of documents.

The primary objective of these improvements is to offer more formatting options and more variability for the conditions under which formatting may be applied. Examples of formatting options that are less commonly available in automated publishing include:

Columns of varying widths on the same page
Object rotation at any angle
Objects that span a varying number of columns
Objects that �float� to a location on the page (such as upper left corner, lower half, etc.)

Examples of formatting conditions that are less commonly available include those that are dependent on layout, such as �place the object to the right of text in the left column or to the left of text in the right column.�

Combining Automation and the Human Touch

No matter how sophisticated the formatting capabilities of automated publishing software, there will always be a limit beyond which requires human intervention.

But why not gain the benefits of both? The ideal solution is to apply automation to the greatest extent possible and allow manual adjustment of the automatically composed output. With this combination, almost any type of document can be published with full or partial automation.

That combination is exactly what Arbortext aimed to achieve with its acquisition of Advent3B2. We realized that to fulfill the goal of enterprise publishing, we have to support all types of documents: from those that cannot be automated at all, such as marketing brochures, to those that can be fully automated, such as technical manuals and legal documents.

To the extent that enterprise publishing encompasses additional types of documents, it brings not only the benefits of automation but also of reuse. The capability to reuse information across all types of documents will eventually bridge the islands of information that exist today throughout the organization.

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