Fellow Framers:
The dreaded day has come: the powers that be want to go toward a future in publishing in XML. Here's the lowdown: Company: Pennsylvania Bar Institute. We do continuing legal education seminars for lawyers, and also have a publications department , PBI Press, that does legal reference-type books. I am in charge of the editing and production of those books, and we have a small staff that has been working with FrameMaker (regular version, Frame 7) to produce them. Type of product: There are two different types of publications produced right now. For our seminar side of things, we produce a hard-copy book that is printed in-house in our print shop. These are quick-and-dirty books that are put together at the last minute sometimes when the lawyers who write chapters for us get them to us. The book chapters usually come from various authors and until a little while ago had been assembled in hard-copy format with manual pagination and tables of contents typed up by the program secretaries. They now are trying to get all the chapters in electronic form so that they have them for e-pubs, which are online articles we offer for sale on our website. These chapters are in Word or WordPerfect and the secretaries do the tables of contents in Word. The e-pubs are PDFs of these chapters. The PBI Press books, on the other hand, are more formal reference books that are cite checked, copy edited, typeset in FrameMaker, and proofread. We generate tables of contents, indexes of cases, and indexes of statutes with Frame. We have an outside indexer do subject matter indexes, which we then typeset and insert links to each page number by cross-reference so that the next time we update the books, the index will be mostly current and we only have to do an in-house tweaking to add new subject items. For most of our books, we do an accompanying CD-ROM by converting the Frame files to PDFs using Acrobat 8. The company sees the future in single-source publishing, where we will create both print and online versions of books, and eventually new products like PDA-formatted content. Now, the question: What will we have to do differently from the way we produce a book in regular Frame today in order to make it XML if we went to structured Frame? I have seen people on this list ask questions that involve EDDs and DTDs, and, as an English and art major, would rather throw myself under a bus than to have to work with computer programming-looking stuff like that. (No offense to all you techies out there in STC land.) Is structured Frame flexible enough to allow for extremely UNstructured content like we get from lawyers where we have a multiauthor book and one person has structured their chapter one way and others structure it another way, and because of the legal content, it CAN'T be made consistent because that's the way the statutes are? And does it allow for manual workarounds like we do when we get footnotes that take up 6 inches of a page and we must manually break things to keep the footnotes with their references in the text? What level of brainpower is needed for a worker to use structured Frame? It's hard enough as it is to find people who can pick up Frame itself with a level of competence we need (especially at the salaries we give them as a nonprofit). What would a general salary range be for someone to be a desktop publisher/typesetter working with structured Frame? With structured Frame, do you typeset a Frame book and then do something with the EDD/ DTD stuff, or do you have to plan the book with the structural elements from the beginning, and how much extra time does all that other stuff take to do to make it XML? Am I overreacting, and is structured Frame not as much of a horror as I think it's going to be? I'm not quite sure why PDFs, which have been perfectly fine for our electronic publishing to date, are not seen as an adequate delivery medium for the future, Whew! Anyone willing to take a stab at convincing me we need to go with structure in the future? Wendy McGovern Publications Editor Pennsylvania Bar Institute 5080 Ritter Road Mechanicsburg, PA 17055-6903 1-800-932-4637, ext. 2257 wmcgovern at pbi.org
