The tyranny of print: wagging the electronic dog

Print.  From newspapers to magazines to trade books, reference books, journals, textbooks and so on, we have lived with printed pages all of our lives.  Now we are seeing the Internet finally start to mature and for several diverse clients, the day where electronic content catches up and eclipses the value of print is here or just on the horizon.  Several of our clients are taking action to change their operations seeing that their businesses will earn, or are already earning more revenue through electronic rather than print content. 

What could be simpler?  The rational thing for management to do is to begin to switch the perspective of your organization to consider web and other electronic products first and then to shuffle that content off to the waning print operation to prepare editions for the still loyal (and paying) print edition customers.  The current best practices of producing print editions, extracting XML and transforming it to various outputs (Web, RSS, email newsletter, syndication, etc) should be reversed it seems.  Why not produce a web edition first, or a general electronic edition in XML, import it into a page layout program and be done with it?

Well, as I’ve sometimes learned the hard way, the devil is in the details.  I’m glad to say, however, that while technology has not fully caught up with this proposition, technology is not the major stumbling block: it's design.  With apologies to the designers I have known and loved (or not), your age old tradition of making articles and illustrations neatly fit together on the printed page, of making the page itself attractive and readable given its finite real estate has put a monkey wrench into our dreams here. 

Much of the print world it seems has been formulated to require copy fitting to meet these presumptuous designers’ dreams which are, as must be admitted, partially derived from the finite real estate of the page size and the finite number of pages planned for each edition.  The web and almost all of our lovable electronic formats don’t have such finite real estate requirements.  As we all know, web articles can keep flowing as long as we want to have our customers hit the scroll button.  Electronic design requirements are less stringent than with print.

This leaves many of our publishing friends with the unhappy knowledge that if content is to be produced for both print and electronic output, that print requirements will always trump electronic requirements.  In other words, the less important print will wag the electronic dog.  An electronic article will need to be copy fitted to a printed page before it can be considered final for multiple mediums.  How unfair is that?

Unless publishers are willing to compromise current product standards, by, for example, implementing significant print design standardizations, outputting different versions of content for different mediums or some other strategy, then this difficulty will remain, and applications like Adobe InCopy, as well as the systems that integrate InDesign and InCopy, will continue to be part of the overall mix of technologies for multiple medium publishing for some time to come.  It means that content management and XML solutions will need to incorporate these page layout and editorial applications and systems even if systems development dollars going forward have the primary purpose of streamlining electronic content production and distribution.  That or drop print editions altogether.

Comments

[Dorothy Hoskins]

Having worked for some years in publication design (technical and marketing) and then having worked in XML/XSL for web publishing, I know firsthand the difficulty of prying print folks away from the "perfect page layout". I think one solution, which I am exploring, is better integration of CSS with XML for web that can also assist with "printable" web pages (suppressing navigation bars and ads) with the page breaks and headers that help web content look more professional. And can't Adobe leverage their FrameMaker experience to create a better XML capabilty for InDesign? The designers need more friendly tools (FM has far too high a learning curve) if XML publishing is going to be part of their workload. Both sides of the technology divide need to work towards some common tools.

[Barrett Niehus]

Not only are online requirements impacting the general formatting of print, but new communication mediums, blogs and IM systems are having a huge impact on the overall form of the text. Both format and structure have been disregarded for the sake of expedient communication.

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