February 03, 2009

Multi-Channel Pre-Flight

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Ask any print designer what pre-flighting is and that person will most likely describe a quality assurance process that they follow to prepare their spreads and layouts for printing. Before going to press, designers must be sure that they have included all the necessary document fonts, and that all graphics have been properly resized and are the correct resolution and color space.

Designers also need to make sure to eliminate any overset text that will not print and to check that there are not too many colors used for the job specified. Yes, a print designer must verify many things before sending to press. Because print mistakes cost money, this quality assurance and attention to detail is usually part of every job sent to print.

Desktop publishing software such as InDesign and QuarkXPress have built-in tools to assist with checking and pre-flighting documents. If you look to the other end of the publishing spectrum, you will find link validation tools and WC3 standards, among other tools, to help Web designers ensure their sites will work and display consistently the same across browsers.

A number of recent cross-media publishing projects have me thinking about ways to not only pre-flight a print layout, or a Web page, but how to pre-flight content for multi-channel publishing. Right now, many difficulties and roadblocks are in place that make achieving a cross-media content publishing workflow complicated. First, you have to determine where the content originates from and in what format it is written. Next, you have to determine how to configure that content into a neutral XML format, and then figure out how to integrate that XML content into different publishing mediums.

Each publishing format treats the content differently, but the main difficultly in these integrations is making sure all the necessary content and metadata exist and are properly tagged for publishing across media types. But what if there were ways to prepare, or "pre-flight," your content to ensure a less bumpy ride whether publishing with an XML first or XML last workflow?

A majority of content in books, magazines and newspapers is started first in Microsoft Word, and is unstructured. Some publishing workflows incorporate XML editing applications or use Adobe InCopy or even XML editors like Oxygen, but Microsoft Word still remains the de facto standard. Preparing this content for multi-channel publishing often involves much copy-pasting, manual tagging, element labeling and content structuring by an individual who is usually neither the author, nor the editor. This task usually falls upon a developer, a Web editor or someone else in a Web production role.

What if the tagging, the structuring and the metadata properties were complete and correct by the time you wanted to publish this content?



We recently built a set of InCopy and InDesign scripts for a client to help pre-flight content before exporting to XML. The goal of these scripts is to ensure that all necessary copy elements are included and properly tagged, and to call out any elements on the page that are not tagged for XML export. By running content through these Web pre-flight scripts, the client could ensure that the content was ready for import into its Web content management system on the first try.



While this pre-flight system was built for checking items prior to export, the same principles could be applied to the content further upstream. Writers and editors could help by clearly structuring their MS Word draft documents. Calling out keywords and using a consistent set of MS Word style-sheets would also set up the content for easier cross-media publishing.

Using the XML schema validation tools in InDesign and InCopy and the newly extended Pre-flight panel in CS4, I can imagine some new, interesting ways of pre-flighting content for multi-channel publishing that we will be exploring in the coming months.

Let me know your thoughts below in the comments area. Is "pre-flighting" content for multi-channel publishing a major burden in your workflow? Could you ever envision your writers and editors using some sort of validation tool to make sure their content is highly re-usable?

Posted at 02:34 pm by Ivan Mironchuk

Technorati Tags: Pre-flight cross-media publishing content authoring XML workflows

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