On Fri, Dec 06, 2002 at 10:27:00AM -0600, Austin, Darrel wrote:
> One bit of content we are planning on disseminating via a CMS has an unusual
> restriction: the pagination must be preserved.
>
> These are documents that ultimately need to be searchable, viewable,
> parsable, but also retain a specic pagination scheme for proper citations.
> For instance, the document, itself, may cite another page of the document,
> and other documents need to cite specific pages of other documents.
>
> The easy solution is to just publish them as PDFs, but that just doesn't
> seem to be the elegant solution in my mind. Is there way to store structured
> content in a way that also retains the page structure of the original typed
> paper document? Or would PDF be the way to go?
Setting aside the question of whether page citations themselves are an
outmoded mechanism, I see no reason why you couldn't break your
content up into blocks and then maintain an index of which blocks
represent which pages in which documents. Offhand, I know of no
packaged CMS that does this.
It raises some other questions - are you going to allow people to edit
the content online and backfill to some print publication while
maintaining a page numbering scheme, or are they read-only from the
CMS perspective? The former would be much more difficult, but not
impossible.
Alternatively, you might want to design this in such a way as to have
some online indexing scheme (section hierarchy, or something similar)
that is translated to specific page numbers for offline
purposes. Abstraction is your friend here.
--
- Adam
-----
Adam Fields, Managing Partner, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Surgam, Inc. is a technology consulting firm with strong background in
delivering scalable and robust enterprise web and IT applications.
http://www.adamfields.com
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