CTO Articles
Published in IT World
June 13, 2006
High quality paper publishing considered harmful
So, you want to produce a beautiful looking printed book/catalog of some kind? No problem. These days, you can do it all effortlessly with electronic tools. No sweat. At the end of the process you will end up with electronic master files for your publication, giving you complete freedom to produce future editions, re-use your own content in other publications and so on...
Sadly, it does not always work out this way. It is all too easy to end up in a situation where the only version of your content that you can confidently assert matches the paper version is, um, the paper version.
Here is how this situation tends to arise. The chain starts with Betty. Betty is the domain expert who writes the content. Betty uses her desktop word processor to type up the text. Betty - being a domain expert - is a very busy and expensive resource. She does not have the time to worry about the finer points of punctuation or page layout or binding or any of that stuff.
When Betty has produced her content, she hands it over to Bob. Bob worries about punctuation and page layout and all that stuff. He uses a page layout program to make Betty's content look nice on the page and prepares it to go to the print shop in the form of postscript files.
Betty and Bob work in a pressured environment. Timelines are always tight. It is not unusual for Betty to call Bob from an airport somewhere and ask for changes to the page proofs Bob has produced. Sometimes these are just typos, sometimes they are more extensive than that. If Bob had the time, he would go back to Betty's original word processor files, make the modifications there, send them to Betty so that she has the up-to-date files, then re-process the word processor files through his page layout program.
Most of the time, Bob does not have the luxury of time required to do this. To get the job done, he makes the modifications Betty needs directly in the page layout program.
When Bob has postscript files he is happy with, he sends them on to Bill in the print shop. Bill too, works in a pressured environment. Timelines are always tight. Sometimes Bill calls Bob from an airport somewhere to ask for a change to the page proofs Bill has produced for Bob. If Bob and Bill had the time, they would work together to go back to Betty's original word processor files, make the modifications there, send them to Betty so that she has the up-to-date files, then re-process the word processor files through his page layout program, then re-generate the postscript files.
Most of the time, Bob and Bill do not have the luxury of time required to do this. To get the job done, Bill makes the modifications directly to the postscript files so that he can go ahead to create the printing plates.
Betty, Bob and Bill all try to keep track of any last minute modifications to content and try to ensure that the changes are fed back "upstream" as required. Unfortunately, with all that is going on in all of their daily working lives, it is tough to do this. It is even tougher to know that messages sent upstream actually get acted upon. There is always some higher priority item on the TODO list than "fix up the master electronic files for the last print job.".
Fast forward the clock say, 5 years. You are staring at a shelf-full of excellent paper-based publications. You decide to turn them into web pages for your new on-line business. The CEO asks the obvious question "We have all the master electronic files right?"
Are you sure of the answer?