John W Maxwell (plus MPub grad students)
Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing
Simon Fraser University
[jmax] @ sfu.ca
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:
"XML Production: Start with the Web," in the Journal of Electronic Publishing 13 (1): http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0013.106
The XHTML -to- ICML transformation script is hosted at Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/ickmull
[XML Production: Start with the Web] – paper from BookCamp Toronto, June 2009
[Brief for EndSheet]
[XML 101] - slides and notes for my presentation to PubWest 2009, Tucson AZ (Nov 12)
[Slides] from various other presentations
A [Project Brief] for the PKP folks
Cory Doctorow's [Makers] – a test case: how fast can you do an interior layout (a challenge made by bowerbird)? Here are PDF/print and ePub versions, both created within half an hour.
HD Thoreau's [Autumnal Tints], a test case taken straight from the free etext.