XML Production: Start with the Web

John W Maxwell (plus MPub grad students)
Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing
Simon Fraser University
jmax @ sfu. ca

XML Production: Start with the Web is an ongoing R&D Project from SFU’s Master of Publishing Program. We’ve prototyped a web-first approach to implementing an XML-based editorial and production workflow. Free web content-management systems, holding simple XHTML content can form the basis of a print-friendly publishing workflow. A simple XML transformation from HTML to Adobe InDesign CS4 (via Adobe’s IDML file format) makes professional-quality print integration easy and painless. Better, keeping the content native in HTML makes ebooks and other digital publishing options much simpler than trying to pull these formats out of print-first workflows.

Papers and resources:

Maxwell, John W. & Kathleen Fraser (2010). “Traversing the Book of MPub: An Agile, Web-first Publishing Model,” in the Journal of Electronic Publishing 13(3). December 2010. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0013.303

…also available, a local HTML copy of the above paper, and an InDesign-formatted PDF version of the article, using the techniques described in the paper.

Our XHTML-to-ICML transformation script is hosted at Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/ickmull

Slides from my presentation at O’Reilly Tools of Change (Feb 16, 2011), with Hugh McGuire and Kirk Biglione: An Open, Webby, Book Publishing System

My presentation slides from PubWest 2010 (in Santa Fe, Nov 4, 2010)

The Book of MPub – an end-to-end book project (authoring through to multi-mode production) by the SFU Master of Publishing cohort of 2009-2010, produced using the web-first workflow described here.

Maxwell et al. 2009. “XML Production: Start with the Web,” in the Journal of Electronic Publishing 13 (1).

A Web-first Publishing Workflow, for EndSheet, the PubWest newsletter, May 2010.

A Brief for the Public Knowledge Project developers (Dec 2009)