Proceedings

Abstract:

While technical documentation has traditionally been the domain for structured authoring, there is increasing interest in using XML for more “creative” materials such as sales brochures and marketing collateral. Such pre-sales materials often have even more compelling opportunities for single-sourcing and reuse than technical documents. Up to now, these materials have been produced one at a time in page-oriented publishing systems like Adobe InDesign and Quark. While this provides maximum flexibility in controlling exact page layouts, it can create a nightmare when small changes must be replicated across all the independent pages and documents. Why can’t we use XML to more flexibly handle this kind of content? In fact, we can! Using page formats from real marketing content, this whitepaper demonstrates how XML tools can be used to maintain highly graphical sales collateral, web pages, and product catalogs from a single source of XML information.