'X' Marks the Spot - From Meaningless Acronym to Real Substance

»Nicola Ashley, »Advent Publishing Systems

»Richard Jinks, »Advent Publishing Systems

»Jurgen Haas, »Advent Publishing Systems

»Lawrie Stevens, »Advent Publishing Systems

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Abstract

Built on Advent's original adoption of SGML as its internal file structure and subsequent support for additional standards. This release is truly ground breaking and takes the support of standards in any application to a new level. Having seen the potential of XML and its related standards for leveraging the strength and power of its high end publishing system, Advent have embraced all these standards fully to give, for the first time, true end-to-end standards compliance in the composition process.

XML, XPath, XSL, XSLT, SVG, XSL:FO, SGML, MathML, UNICODE and CALS are all high profile and potentially powerful standards but for anyone wishing to truly harness their collective potential in industrial applications these remain largely meaningless acronyms unless they are adopted fully and their importance realised. The new version of 3B2 is the World's first product to truly embrace all of these in a single environment. At the cutting edge in both its adoption of standards and technologies the V8 3B2 will demonstrate that in combination the result is far greater than the sum of its parts and finally represents real substance in the application of standards in practical production environments.

In addition to its' support of standards, Advent continues to add functionality to compliment the needs of high-end and complex publishing environments by further enhancing the capability of users to automate and overcome previously 'impossible' challenges.

The presentation will discuss Advent's philosophy and technology and will show and explore:

- the benefits of these standards in developing solutions and the significant time savings to be gained.

- the advantages in production of using these standards in combination.

- the benefits of being able to truly 'round trip' instances for editing, revision or proofing.

The launch of the new 3B2 V8 is a pivotal moment in the arena of 'X' technologies and clearly marks the point at which these standards became substantiative and offer a practical 'open' alternative to propriety systems.

Keywords

»Application, »Practical, »Production, »Publishing, »Standards, »XML.

The full paper was not available at the time the proceedings were created. Please check the conference web site, http://www.xmleurope.com, to find an updated version of this paper.

Biography

»Nicola Ashley

»Advent Publishing Systems

»Swindon, Wiltshire

»United Kingdom

Email: nicola@3b2.com

Web: http://www.3b2.com

to be updated

»Richard Jinks

»Advent Publishing Systems

»to be updated

Email: richard@3b2.com

Richard Jinks has been a developer at Advent Publishing Systems for 18months. During this time, he has been responsible for improving supportfor XML and XSLT processing and for adding native support for SVG graphicsCSS Stylesheets and XSL-FO. Prior to joining Advent Publishing Systems, Richard spent 4 years as a Software Engineer and a Database Administrator, becoming an Oracle Certificatied Database Administrator as a result.

»Jurgen Haas

»Advent Publishing Systems

Jürgen Haas, Technical and Advent main board director is responsible forR&D and customer services, including documentation, training, support andIT. Together with the sales and project teams he coordinates all technicalefforts relating to customer requirements. His main focus is thedevelopment of product strategy for the current and future business ofAdvent and their customers.Jürgen has 12 years of experience providing solutions for the publishingindustry based on 3B2 technology. He studied economics, management, lawand politics before starting his own business, SatzConcept GmbH, in 1989which grew to become Advent's largest independent reseller of 3B2, solutions and services in central Europe. SatzConcept was acquired by Advent in 2001.

»Lawrie Stevens

»Advent Publishing Systems

»to be updated

Lawrie Stevens has been with Advent since 3B2 was first launched in 1987 and has served the Company in a number of roles. In January this year he took up his new role as Chief Technology Officer and immediately prior to that was instrumental in Advent's entry into the US and Far East markets.He has a strong background in the technical needs of publishers and the technologies needed to meet those needs. Through his involvement in areas such as STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical), Legal and Aerospace he gained knowledge and understanding of SGML and other standards at an early stage and through his involvement in the implementation and integration of 3B2 in multinational and global organisations has gained a true understanding of the business needs of customers.