Chart of Cross-media Publishing Solutions and Sources July 2001 PDF Format [17k]

Many early attempts at cross-media tools like Quark's Immedia, and e-document formats like Common Ground (which I used in 1993 to publish an e-zine called Nu*Real designed in PageMaker, and distributed on AOL) have pretty much gone the way of the dodo.

Today the goal is no single solution but a morass of Web, wireless, e-books, and emerging interactive media like Web-enabled DVD and UltimateTV. And each iteration of these major formats may have one or more subset forms. The killer app the industry is chasing is much the same idea as that of the catalog publishing goal: a client-server model where information will be stored in a central server or data containers, and the information is repurposed via the Internet/Intranet using a Web browser front-end and/or through existing client (desktop-based versus server-based) applications like QuarkXPress and InDesign.

Whither Standards

The issue with almost all cross-media solutions has been, and will continue to be, a common format for communicating between both computer platforms for data input via Internet and local networks, as well as repurpose of assets into multiple formats without rebuilding everyhing over and over.

For the audio and video industry, what has made cross-media possible has been the long-ago adoption of relative standards which are easily converted. With audio you might have .AIFF for MacOS and .WAV for Windows, and the operating system itself read/writes these file types. Audio editing tools that build on these formats for audio recording can then output to multiple formats. Video works much the same way on the desktop. Thus you have audio/video cross-media tools like Media100's MediaCleaner Pro which can take just about any audio or video project and export it to one or more other formats at the same time.

Graphics file formats and many word processing formats offer similar interoperability. Print publishing, however, and the myriad of Web-related file formats now in use, don't share a common file format. Try opening a Microsoft Publisher document in Quark, or an InDesign file in PageMaker and you hit a dead end pretty quickly

Unfortunately, there is no common publishing file format likely to be developed, due to differences in how the 900-pound gorillas that are Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Sun, and Quark, operate. The true solution may have come from a markup language developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the folks who manage what constitutes HTML "standards." The standardized generalized markup language (SGML), and its child, the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), offer a way for publishing and Web to "get along" by developing applications that talk in both directions.

Not a Shirt Size

XML is not a new way to buy clothing, and is not a document format, but it is in fact a programming environment called eXtensible Markup Language. And it's somewhat like HTML and Java and C++ in that it offers developers a tool to write solution applications, allowing information to be managed and repurposed in more effective ways. There's even a version which melds with HTML called XHTML, providing simple ways for HTML documents to query XML. Because XML has built-in query functions (Xpath and Xquery) it's relatively easy for a developer to make an XML-enabled tool and point it at a data source.

Solutions like ArborText's Epic line of solutions provide a network document management tool which saves all work from a client seat to a server container. All text copy, illustrations, graphics and rich media are saved and managed through XML and Oracle databases. Since all data is saved at the outset in XML, it can be repurposed using templates to be output in different formats. So, you can start with the intent to build a 350-page technical manual, then simply re-flow the data into templates for Web, Wireless, and/or CD-ROM.

Elixir's Opus 4.3 works with XML in a similar way and provides tools to convert Xerox and other popular enterprise documents formats into XML container files along with graphics. ODBC tools allow for easy connection to desktop and Web-based data for use within dynamic documents. Strong multi-language support allows repurpose of documents in multiple formats and in multiple languages from common templates.

Still, most of the companies who have embraced XML are the companies who tailor their solutions to the large companies with a wide variety of document needs, like Ford Motor Company, or aerospace. For traditional book and periodical print publishing some of the players are stepping up to XML/SGML, while others chose to develop their own proprietary approaches to cross-media data creation and output.

Microsoft's entire ".NET" strategy revolves around XML-based technologies to make all of their tools and solutions compatible rather than the current "island of their own" approach. This is why usually critical and highly skeptical developers are actually in favor of the dot-net initiative. So, as the saying goes, if you don't use XML -- you will.

One of the coolest examples of XML is the Jabber application (jabber.com), which allows AOL, MSN and Yahoo! instant messaging (IM) applications to talk to one another over the Web, even though the networks and messaging clients are incompatible. By converting both the applications and the messages into an XML structure, content can flow between the disparate and competing protocols.

Crossing Over

The two big desktop publishing companies, Adobe and Quark, have similar but divergent views on how to approach enabling print publishers to take their content to other media.

Adobe's primary cross-media network publishing solution is called InScope, and works with InCopy, Photoshop, and InDesign to manage editing and creation of content, approvals, collaboration, archiving of assets, and output to multiple file formats. Communication through these core products is enabled by using another standard called WebDAV, which essentially provides a common request/acquire/transmit layer via Web-enabled networks like the Internet, an Intranet/LAN, and external private networks. Like the Elixir and ArborText products, InCopy uses an Oracle8-based database and tools like Apple's WebObjects (which can be used by an integrator to build custom solutions). It's priced in the same range of other corporate document systems, starting at $1,200 per seat (station), with enterprise pricing dependent on number of seats.

Adobe continues to create cross-communicative native file sharing across their desktop applications (PageMaker 7 can open Photoshop and Illustrator files natively without having to first make them into CMYK TIF or EPS files), and all of their current products offer export to variously featured Acrobat PDF formats. And most traditional Adobe print publishing applications allow some rudimentary export to Web documents like HTML/XML.

The new version of FrameMaker+SGML 6, provides for XML output, although it's really done through an add-on product from Quadralay rather than internally through the application itself. On the plus-side, there are a wealth of templates for Quadralay products that can repurpose FrameMaker documents into a wide variety of other output formats including Wireless and eBooks.

Acrobat 5 goes both ways, and even captures entire Web sites to one large hyperlinked PDF file, either from GoLive, or straight off the Web. This reverse-approach allows one to build a Web site in HTML then convert it into a printable document (albeit at "screen" resolution). The much misunderstood SVG format, primarly being promoted by Adobe, offers some innovations because it can combine the functionality of PDF, Flash, XML and Java in a single file format. So, for illustrative purposes, if you had your Web page built with SVG graphical components, you could then reverse publish to a press-ready PDF and print high-resolution documents which were actually authored for the Web.

Quark, on the other hand, is evangelizing their Active Publishing Server (APS) as a natural progression from their publishing system (QPS). Using a server application suite mated to a front-end that works like QuarkXPress, you can utilize the same content, layouts and asset management tools to "publish" to print, print-on-demand, and Web, from one system. Quark has the benefit of being the number one print publishing tool, with its own strong asset management product QuarkDMS, and so there are many who would find a create-once, publish-many, asset-management solution with the Quark interface to be of great value. Like the corporate document solution providers, Quark is using XML as the framework for their next-generation solutions like APS. (Since this product was not yet shipping at the time of writing, it will be reviewed in a future issue.)

The weakest company in the print/paper publishing field, but one of the strongest in the Web content management side, Macromedia, actually outdoes Adobe's Illustrator for cross-media with the launch of FreeHand 10. The latest version of FreeHand can do page layouts, vector illustration (which can be used for outdoor media, and packaging), export to HTML and Flash, and even PDF. FreeHand is one of the most versatile jack-of-all-trades print to Web to animation tools out there right now.

FreeHand can't do long-documents (e.g., catalogs and textbooks) well, but Macromedia could easily leverage the technology into a front-end for its array of dynamic Web and wireless server-side applications and its ColdFusion mark-up language (Allaire and Macromedia recently merged). In fact, when partnered with stable-mates FireWorks and Dreamweaver, you can also output to wireless Web formats because both support WAP graphics and HTML.

Who Needs It

A vast number of companies around the world are gearing up for cross-media on both sides of the solution developer and publisher-user fence; from the small designer with a few brochure and Web-design clients to the Fortune 500 where document management concerns not so much traditional books but a plethora of manuals, technical charts, and white papers.

Some technology strategists question the need for such highly distributed network systems for cross-media outside of the enterprise (the large corporation), due to high cost of implementation, licensing, and security issues. Since many print-to-Web-to-wireless initiatives were launched during the height of the "Dot Com Gold Rush" of the recent past, some trend watchers like The Pfeiffer Report (pfeifferreport.com) question whether companies will find a return on investment since there is no sure business model right now for profiting from either the Web or wireless from traditional print publishing content. Additionally, no one company except perhaps for Quark, has the high ground in both asset management and publishing tools. Right now, few print-to-Web or Web-to-print businesses are in the black, and the core wireless technologies are shifting as fast as industry stock prices.

Certainly if you have an existing customer base, or audience, then cross-media is essential to brand-growth and reduced costs over time. Folks like IBM who need to publish internal white-papers, technical data sheets, customer information, promotion brochures, even instruction manuals, can benefit from entering the data once and then re-using it as the requirement for a new output format arises. It makes no sense to re-enter things like product tech-specs and promo copy over and over. With proper security, even an external ad agency could retrieve this information for use in print ads or other needs via the Web or extranet.

While there are high costs associated with the majority of the cross-media document management solutions, there are some tools you can use right now no matter what your budget or output needs.

Cross-Media DIY

For the near-term, and for most of us, the most useful cross-media solutions will be those which are more niche-specific, don't require education on using XML, and are inexpensive. This means, if you only intend to output to a couple of formats like print and e-book, you might not need Web publishing functionality. After all, for a book publisher, it's unlikely they would want to immediately "publish" books to HTML.

Similarly, many may wish to simply work with their existing tools like PageMaker and QuarkXpress, but save time by taking existing files and re-publishing them to other formats like HTML. One example of this is Extensis' BeyondPress 4.0 which does a very good job of translating Quark layouts to Web-pages using cascading style sheets and DHTML layers.

TerryMorse software has an inexpensive print-to-Web tool that takes just about any document you can print on the Mac including Quark, PageMaker and Microsoft Office, and outputs to clean HTML. For Windows, InZone offers a similar product called Click to Convert. OverDrive has ReaderWorks Publisher, a free tool to convert your text and HTML files into the Microsoft Reader .LIT format.

The Promise

Cross-media publishing promises to make extinct the need of multiple departments to re-invent common design and data elements, cutting down on errors, complexity, time-to-publish, and long-term cost of doing business. If it's done right cross-media as a solution model can create a new revolution in publishing which will trickle down to the tools we all use everyday, ultimately enhancing both the document-building process as well as the end-user audience experience.

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