This is something I have some experience with, having worked at Australia's largest legal publisher.
Preserving paging information is vital for looseleaf, but is very dificult all at the same time * You need to be able to break *anywhere* - that could be in the middle of paragraph * If you are going to be reusing the content for different publications you need to be able to preserve different page breaks for different publications * SGML/XML is intrinsically hierachical/tree like, but loose leaf pages are instrinsically a linear list. They just don't map very well. It is a nasty problem to try and solve, particularly using a purely technological solution. I did a lot of thinking about this one. In my view it would be damn near impossible for a CMS to maintain that kind of state. Personally, I think that the CMS should output a set of "Book Specific Content" to another application whose job it is track page numbers and page breaks from one version of a book to the next. At 19:42 9/12/2002, Mike McNamara wrote:
Hi Darrel, As Bill Trippe mentioned in his reply, this is an old but very current problem that many Legal & Technical publishers of 'large-volume' documents face as they move their publications to a variety of electronic media products whilst still having to maintain paper products and the various 'links' and updates (loose-leaf) to them. PDF can certainly 'solve' some of these problems, but as Bill mentioned the problem may be better solved by looking at a 'composition' engine where you can create controlled paged publications that can be maintained with loose-leaf versioning control. Typically, but not always, these 'composition' engines/formatters can be fed structured data such as XML & SGML (however many of today's data streams into these engines/formatters remain proprietary), the same data stream (preferably the structured ones) can also be used to feed the production engines of other multimedia products. Some question that I would ask are how many pages are we talking about here? If it's thousands then a non/structured data/composition engine may be the way to go, if it's only hundreds then the cost of implementation may prohibit that route. Another question would be what is the current format of the original data? I would suspect that there are a few different ones? I have worked with a number of Legal/Technical publishers over the past few years with there own composition formatters/engines and in some cases the service companies that provide paged products to them and would be happy to share some background experiences off-list if you would like. You should be assured that you are not the only person with this problem out there, but you can also be assured that there are a number of solutions to the problem, depending on how you want to go about it. Mike McNamara > 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? > > -Darrel > -- > http://cms-list.org/ > trim your replies for good karma. -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
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