A Unified and Cloud-Based mostly Publishing Resolution Is the Future

The publishing enterprise is all the time about battling time. It’s about placing content material collectively and having a bunch of individuals collaborate to make sure that the content material meets shopper necessities throughout the shortest time attainable. Your entire publishing ecosystem faces margin pressures, and a shorter time to market will successfully cut back the price of a product whereas rising its backside line.

Publishers have all the time been in search of extra environment friendly options. Other than coping with inside workflows and outsourced processes and coordinating with a large number of distributors for every specialised activity, publishers additionally want to trace all these via their very own techniques or through their distributors’ platforms. Coordinating these duties in the course of the Covid-19 pandemic and throughout the WFH atmosphere has been difficult to say the least.

However what if all these duties are made accessible inside a safe atmosphere? How a couple of cloud-based publishing resolution designed to effectively and successfully streamline associated workflows whereas assembly ever-changing shopper calls for?

A platform powered by clever automation to raise and strengthen the standard guide and journal publishing course of whereas empowering customers via know-how and innovation is certainly a transfer in the proper route. An XML-first workflow is gaining popularity, and whereas that’s good, it’s merely not sufficient. From the writer’s standpoint, such a workflow lies behind the display screen and stays opaque.

It’s time to carry the entire course of to the stakeholders concerned within the content material growth workflow and make it extra open, collaborative, and straightforward to make use of. This implies having WYSIWG-structured authoring instruments inside a collaborative atmosphere, traceability, monitoring, reference administration capabilities, publisher-based custom-made workflow, and digital asset administration, with a number of output choices, reminiscent of proofs, XML, EPUB, HTML, advertising PDF, bookmarked PDF, and print PDF with auto-generation capabilities.

Many giant publishers have their very own CMS, and a super publishing suite should be capable of present e-deliverables reminiscent of XML and HTML at any level within the manufacturing lifecycle to permit them to test the rendering on their platforms. Whether or not the writer needs it or not, it is a crucial criterion to think about, since this ensures {that a} single-source integrity is maintained all through the publishing course of. The system also needs to be API-enabled to work together with publishers’ present workflows in an effort to guarantee correct integration. To this finish, course of integration and the flexibility to assist it is just attainable when the options supplier has a robust know-how background and foresight.

On the identical time, the publishing resolution should supply an easy-to-use interface with an intuitive Phrase-like atmosphere that allows authors, content material contributors, and editors to collaborate seamlessly. Grammar and style-checking widgets will assist to enhance sentence construction and content material readability. Then there should be choices to make use of normal shortcut keystrokes, with a menu for context-sensitive instructions, or instruments for tech-savvy authors to compose in LaTeX or use at their discretion. A strong equation editor in a WYSIWIG atmosphere that takes in LaTeX/MathML for math and scientific formulation might be an excellent addition. The icing on the cake might be to have MathML3 assist within the backend, regardless of the trail used to writer the formulation.

Editors should additionally be capable of make adjustments with a complete monitoring software that gives an item-by-item revision historical past itemizing the adjustments made and by whom. Right here, an audit path is a helpful characteristic. A form-like interface with devoted toolsets simplifies the duty of managing metadata, references, math, and complicated equations whereas providing alternatives to extend the standard requirements of the content material. Model management of the content material in varied phases of the editorial and manufacturing workflow can also be an important a part of a cloud-based system. Context-specific styling and formatting choices reminiscent of these in InDesign or LaTeX will assist in making content material composing simple and user-friendly. When these processes are made easier, the coaching curve on the seller or publishing aspect turns into considerably shorter and cheaper.

Subsequent, the flexibility to create accessible publications by incorporating accessibility options within the preliminary phases of the manufacturing workflow is essential, particularly with WCAG 2.2 coming quickly and with the rising consciousness inside publishing circles that extra content material should be made accessible, except for assembly regulatory necessities. The power to make custom-made books, which is a big and profitable market, is changing into extra essential for publishers. A super cloud-based system should subsequently be capable of clone any given title for the subsequent version or replace, chunk textual content from a number of titles, and reformat, auto-paginate, and reindex on the fly. This can be a worthwhile and time-saving perform.

Having an interactive dashboard for monitoring manuscripts at a micro degree utilizing click-to-filter and drill-down options will make the publishing course of extra clear and quicker. It’ll allow stakeholders to work seamlessly throughout completely different time zones. Automated workflow notifications that may be custom-made is important.

However there isn’t any want for publishers to emphasize over their conventional workflows or to go looking excessive and low for a custom-built software program. Why reinvent the wheel when there may be already a constructed and continuously up to date system accessible? Enter XEditPro, DiacriTech’s unified cloud-based publishing suite, which has all of the solutions and extra.

XEditPro, presently in model 4.1, is continually up to date with new options and instruments. It combines editorial and manufacturing features to scale back the overall price of content material whereas bringing publications shortly to the market. It’s a confirmed system that’s actually single-source with a number of outputs. Publishers, large and small, have benefitted from this publishing resolution when it comes to elevated profitability and work efficiencies. One main world writer, who has been utilizing XEditPro efficiently for the previous three years, considers it “probably the most highly effective content material transformation system that [he has] evaluated among the many restricted choices within the trade.”

A.R.M. Gopinath, govt v-p at DiacriTech

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