Flatirons Solutions to Speak at Global XML Conference - Aug 2004

BOULDER, Colo. — Flatirons Solutions has been invited to speak at Arbortext Users' Group International (AUGI) 2004, May 5-7, 2004, in Atlanta, Georgia. Flatirons will present two topics which leverage its XML expertise and its innovative, Arbortext-based solutions.

Arbortext is the leading global provider of enterprise publishing software that enables organizations to create and automatically publish large amounts of information, such as technical manuals, pharmaceutical product information, legal information and software documentation.

The following abstracts introduce the topics:

How to Use E3 and a Content Management System
Leveraging an underlying content management (CMS) repository, E3 provides a sophisticated array of XML-based conversion, management, processing and publishing capability. However, sometimes the differences between CMS and E3 functionality can be a bit confusing. For example, an XML-aware CMS may offer some level of XML component management and document assembly capability, or allow XSLT transformations to be attached to XML documents. In reality, E3 is complimentary to the CMS. This presentation will address this topic will specific, easy to understand examples.

Using Epic for "Page Layout" Applications
While technical documentation has traditionally been the domain for structured authoring, there is increasing interest in using XML for more "creative" materials such as sales brochures and marketing collateral. Such pre-sales materials often have even more opportunities for single-sourcing and reuse than technical documents. For example, the same product description may be included in a glossy data sheet, a product catalog, product technical specifications, and across multiple pages on the Web site. Photos, logos, disclaimers and other common information may be used across materials for a great variety of products. Up to now, these materials have been produced one at a time in page-oriented publishing systems like Quark. While this provides maximum flexibility in controlling exact page layouts, it can create a nightmare when small changes must be replicated across all the independent pages and documents.

Why can't we use Epic to more flexibly handle this kind of content? In fact, we can! Using a detailed case study, including a demo and specific use cases, this presentation will demonstrate exactly how Epic can be used to maintain sales collateral, web pages, and product catalogs from a single source of XML information. It will also show how this can be done to mirror existing page layouts, rather than requiring the running text flow characteristic of technical documents.

In addition, we will provide a more general point-by-point comparison of using Epic vs. a page layout engine, including an analysis of the limitations of XSL-FO and potential use of SVG in these applications.

Reference Flatirons' whitepaper, "XML for Creative Content", for more information.