This case study describes a solution which enabled an owner to manage the content of a high-quality printed manual that required regular update. Previously the printshop, who held the softcopy of the publication in their composition systems, had to prepare all updates. SMH Systems provided a solution where the entire document was stored as a single XML file on the owner's departmental server, and a reader whose stylesheets presented the data as a replica of the printed manual pages. An authoring application enabled the data to be composed and maintained by the owner. Additional stylesheets were prepared to make copy for the printshop, and to generate HTML for posting to the corporate intranet.
The manual provided reference data relating to the airline's cargo operations at some 50 airports worldwide. There were 4-7 sections for each airport, with each section employing its own page format. This material had historically been maintained by an external printshop in their publishing software, with new issues prepared by submission of typed copy or marked-up replacement pages and the usual publication cycle of preparing proof copies for review. This process was costly and time-consuming.
IT analysts had looked into options for the users to take control of the source data. They advised that Word and Excel would not be suitable for authoring this manual due to complex multi-level tabular layouts, and while a solution could be developed using Microsoft Access it would be unacceptably complicated due to the need for many dependent tables to support variable numbers of repeating data instances. IT recommended an XML-based approach because this could easily support the data structure and would have clear advantages for downstream processing, but it was found that XML/SGML editors used elsewhere in the organisation did not provide an acceptable user interface for what was a low-usage-but-high-value authoring requirement.
SMH Systems analysed the data and verified that it would be possible to store the content for up to 100 airports as a single XML document of less than half a megabyte and that a custom reader/author application could be prepared which retained the existing page formats. We prepared a proposal which included a mock-up of the proposed application so that the look-and-feel could be considered by the user. Our proposal offered to develop the application and to load up all of the existing data, to provide a turnkey solution where the user could make an immediate start on updates for the next edition of the publication.
This proposal was accepted with SMH Systems to develop the data model and the reader/author application, and the IT department to develop the stylesheets for onward processing:
SMH delivered in two phases. The first phase included:
The second phase delivered the authoring functions, plus all the rest of the data - which was loaded using the authoring tool itself. The author application employed the user interface design described under Solutions for Authoring, with form views to edit content at the detailed level and 'IDCM' functions to insert and delete elements.
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This screenshot shows the cover page for an airport, displayed in the reader application The navigator frame at upper right is a dynamically generated list of all available airports, from which any one can be selected at a time. Clicking the 'Edit' button in the control panel at lower right enables the data for the selected airport to be updated |
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| One of the detail pages for an airport, as in the original printed manual and as seen in the editor application | |||||
The solution included comprehensive technical documentation, so that the IT department could maintain thereafter, plus help screens for the users.
Deployment of the application was trivial: a shared directory was established on the customer's network server, with read access for all in the department and update access for the owner only. The only change to users' PCs was a desktop shortcut to launch the application from the server.
During the development of the reader we confirmed that while we could provide all screens as a precise replica of the printed manual, we recommended some minor changes to improve readability on CRT and LED screens. These included slight increase in font size for some sections, and use of sans-serif fonts where small print was required.
In addition to the reader screens whose appearance copied the printed manual, we provided some other views of the data, to facilitate checking the application and the data load and for ongoing use by downstream consumers of the data.
All of these views, plus the default multi-page view provided by the reader application, could be printed directly on demand. Microsoft's limited support of CSS2 paged-media styles was tested, and in combination with stylesheet logic was adequate to accomplish necessary pagination.
IT provided a production regime where updated versions of the document could be copied by the owner to a well-known location on the department server, when ready for internal publication. A robot process that ran nightly would discover the file and run stylesheets, developed by IT, to convert the data and pass it on - notably to the corporate intranet.
The application was later extended to include 3 additional data sections for each airport. This enabled production of a second manual that re-used much of the data established for the first, but with a repackaged presentation for a different set of readers.