Page Make-Up Application


OBJECTIVE
This page make-up application can be used as any generic page make-up software, but it really excels in time-critical, high-volume, highly standardized page-layout environments such as daily newspaper. In such an environment the page make-up program must be reliable, fast, customizable, extensible, and highly integrated in its computer environment. In other words, it must be "industrial strength" software, and this page make-up application meets all these criteria.

PageMak-UpScrn

DESCRIPTION
The page make-up program can be used in two ways - dtp and industrial mode. In ’dtp’ mode, the data is on the file system and a single user can access publication data for modification. In "industrial" mode, the data is stored in the RDBMS, which provides reliability and multi-user access to the publication data. Except for multi-user access and increased reliability, there is no difference in functionality and interface between the two modes.

Production of a publication proceeds faster and with fewer production errors due to:

  • definition of pages (guides, grids, predefined elements: texts, images, lines), which are handled by a versatile template manager
  • fast and simple application of styles to graphical elements (user-defined keystrokes)
  • multi-user WYSIWYG updates of the same page
  • support for RTF
  • consistent and easy to use user interface
  • journalling (generate incremental version of data at every save)
  • complete integration with NEXTSTEP

Because text is an important element in publications this page make-up program has text handling features not found in most dtp applications. To achieve optimal visual effect, paragraphs are broken into lines as a whole, not on a per-line basis. This creates text with less deviation in "color" than with usual DTP line breaking. Also, text can flow around other frames, and through multiple linked frames. All the usual formatting is supported, such as scaling, baseline shifting, font size changes, etc. Hyphenation language can be set per paragraph, and extensions to the hyphenation can be added by the user. This page make-up program also handles multilingual environments easily.

PageLayoutScrn2
The program can be extended by writing extension modules. Modules can be written for automatic page-layout of special parts of a publication such as TV programs or classified ads. Standalone applications such as monitoring can be developed with the OO-API (PLKit) to read, process and write page make-up data independently of our page make-up program.

This page make-up application is completely integrated in the NEXTSTEP environment and fully supports all services, provided by NEXTSTEP, such as thw drag-and-drop protocol for TIFF and EPS inclusion, color management, spell-checking, dictionary search, e-mail, text services, etc.

Publication definition
Publication-wide styles and templates are defined in a publication definition, which is a separate document.

The style structure is hierarchical. This means that styles inherit settings from their predecessors in the hierarchy, which simplifies creation and maintainance of styles.

Templates are structured in pages within definition. Definition pages are similar to transparencies - they can be combined in any order and applied to any document page with a template filter. Template filter is a list of pages from the definition, which are to be applied when using this filter. Filters can also contain references to other filters, thereby providing for hierarchical template building.

PageLayoutScrn3

FEATURES SUMMARY

fast
user-defined styles and templates, efficient GUI,
multi-user access

reliable
incremental versions, standard SQL relational database
for data storage

customizable
user-defined keystrokes for style application and menu
actions

extensible
OO-API (PLKit)

integrated with NEXTSTEP

SELECT Technology, Inc.