XML centric or print centric?

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Permalink Reply by Jorge Portland on August 31, 2009 at 12:49pm

In Spain, I don't know a publisher who is operating with XML-centric

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Permalink Reply by Chris Cosentino on August 31, 2009 at 4:54pm

O'Reilly is definitely XML-centric. I believe they use docbook.

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Permalink Reply by Andrew Savikas on October 6, 2009 at 12:34pm

That is corrrect. The majority of our books are produced using DocBook XML, which is then output to PDF (print and Web), EPUB, Mobipocket, and HTML. While some of our authors do work directly in XML themselves, in many cases we accept the manuscript in Word or OpenOffice, and then have it converted into DocBook XML for production.

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Permalink Reply by Helga Zunde-Baker on October 14, 2009 at 9:02am

This is great to hear. Are pretty print layouts no longer required or are you transforming your XML in some way for page?

(FWIW I wish authors weren't so additced to Word!)

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Permalink Reply by Andrew Savikas on October 18, 2009 at 10:12am

We use XSLT to output XSL-FO, which is then processed into PDF for printing. For editing and production work, most of our production staff use Oxygen XML, which uses CSS to display the XML content in a word-processor-style interface.

While it's true a lot of authors rely on Word, note that very very few writers use Word for writing blog posts and other web content. Communicating that writing nearly any content is really writing for the Web helps to get people thinking about more web-friendly tools for their writing and editing.

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Permalink Reply by Liz Belmont on October 2, 2009 at 3:46pm

The American Institute of Physics has been XML-centric since 2003.

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