XML for Creative Content and Page Layout Applications

Keywords: creative content, marketing content, page layout, SVG, XSL-FO

Eric Severson
Chief Technology Officer
Flatirons Solutions Corporation
Boulder
Colorado
United States of America
Eric.Severson@FlatironsSolutions.com

Biography

A recognized XML pioneer and content management industry expert, Eric Severson is a past President of OASIS (XML industry consortium), chairperson of the original CALS Tables Technical Committee, a principal designer of the IBM XML Certification Program, and developer of Avalanche’s “FastTAG” intelligent XML markup engine. With over 20 years of industry experience, Eric has held senior management positions in both engineering and marketing roles, worked in Big 5 and IBM consulting practices, and is the founder of a successful XML start-up company. As a founder and CTO of Flatirons Solutions, Eric leads an experienced consulting and systems integration practice specializing in XML-based publishing, content management, and workflow solutions.

Abstract

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. What Makes Creative Content Different?
3. How Are Technical and Creative Documents Alike?
4. Business Reasons to Use XML for Creative Content
5. Five Key Insights
6. Insight #1: Multiple Levels of Complexity
7. Insight #2: The Interesting Documents are Less Complex
8. Insight #3: Requirements Can be Formally Mapped
9. Insight #4: XML Tools Can Handle the Requirements
10. Insight #5: We Can Apply Web Page Techniques to Print
     10.1 Using Tables to Lay Out Objects on a Grid
     10.2 Placing Text Over an Underlying Background Graphic
     10.3 Using SVG as the Background Graphic Format
11. Putting It All Together: A Comprehensive Example
     11.1 Start With a Standard Data Sheet Template in SVG Format
     11.2 Dynamically Add the Product Photo and SVG Header
     11.3 Use an XSLT Transform to Assemble the Final SVG Background
     11.4 Handle the Grid Effects by Formatting Text as an XSL-FO Table
     11.5 Compose Using an XSL-FO Composition Engine
     11.6 Handle the Next Page the Same Way
12. Summary
Appendix 1. Detailed Analysis of XML Feature Support
     Appendix 1.1 Features Available in Current XML Tools
     Appendix 1.2 Additional Features Available in Full XSL-FO
     Appendix 1.3 Additional Features Available in SVG
     Appendix 1.4 Features Only Available in Quark or Adobe InDesign

Legal Disclaimer: All images of marketing content were obtained from the organizations’ public Web sites, are copyrighted to the respective organizations, and are included here solely for the purpose of illustrating typical formats used in marketing-related documents. No other re-use or distribution, nor any endorsement of related products, is authorized or intended.

1. Introduction

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. For example, the same product description may be included in a glossy data sheet, a product catalog, product technical specifications, and across multiple pages on the Web site. Photos, logos, disclaimers and other common information may be used across materials for a great variety of products. 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. It also shows how this can be done to mirror existing page layouts, rather than requiring the running text flow characteristic of technical documents.

2. What Makes Creative Content Different?

Traditional XML publishing applications have focused on airline and automotive engineering documentation, military technical manuals, academic publishing, product user manuals, and a variety of other “technical” documents. These kinds of content share the following kinds of characteristics:

• Free-flowing text with arbitrary line and page breaks.
• Format controlled primarily by style sheets, standardized for each element type.
• Use of a single layout template that applies to all pages in a given section.
• Simple multi-column layout, with standard running headers and footers.
• Straightforward placement of graphics.
• Little use of color.

Meanwhile, a parallel world of “creative” content exists, made up of sales collateral, brochures, product catalogs, and a wealth of other marketing material. In stark contrast to technical documents, these kinds of content are characterized by:

• Use of complex pages designed one at a time.
• Page layouts hand-crafted by graphic artists.
• Precise placement of text and graphics frames.
• Unique design of each individual frame.
• Purposeful overlap and layering of graphics for visual impact.
• Use of sophisticated text effects such as kerning, shadowing and rotation.
• Aggressive use of color.

On the surface, these would seem like two very different worlds – and that’s how they’ve been treated. The first has been the province of word processors and technical documentation systems, and of XML. The second has been the realm of proprietary page layout programs, desktop publishing, and pre-press software.

Despite their obvious differences, however, technical documents and creative content have much in common.

3. How Are Technical and Creative Documents Alike?

In the world of technical publishing, much effort has gone into the concept of driving individual documents out of a “single-source” of shared content. This came from the realization that there is often a great degree of overlap across different document types, and that this information is usually authored and maintained independently. For example, automobiles share many of the same components across makes, models and model years. The information about these components is repeated across all the different user manuals, shop manuals and engineering manuals for each make / model year combination.

And this is not just an issue for the automotive industry. The same is actually true for any product that is sold in many variations but is based on common engineering components – including airplanes, medical devices, computer hardware and software, microchips, and many others.

There are many problems with this sort of overlapping content. In particular, it is expensive to redundantly author and maintain, and extremely difficult to keep synchronized. Every time an engineering change occurs, updates must be painstakingly “rippled through” all the various documents that contain this information.

This problem has become exponentially more complex with the advent of the World Wide Web. Now content is not only repeated across many variations of printed documents, but must also be rippled through all the corresponding Web pages and other electronic versions.

But here’s the thing: each of these product variations requires not only technical documentation but also a set of corresponding marketing documentation. And although the marketing documents are more “creative,” they have exactly the same problem as their tech doc counterparts. Every time an engineering change occurs, it must be rippled through not only the classic technical documents, but also across every corresponding data sheet, product brief, brochure, and product catalog description. Furthermore, these updates must extend to a wealth of individual Web pages that describes the product and its specifications. And marketing documents don’t just share overlapping descriptions: they also have the need to synchronize changes in logos, branding, product photos, benefits statements, and pricing.

As the figure below illustrates, marketing information is highly interrelated, and has exactly the same need for single-sourcing that we’ve been addressing for technical documentation. Although there are important differences in current layout and publishing processes, both technical documents and marketing content:

• Share a tremendous amount of overlapping information that must be redundantly authored and maintained.
• Need to synchronize the same content across documents for related products.
• Need to synchronize the same content across document types targeted for different audiences.
• Need to synchronize the same content across both print and Web outputs.

Figure 1: Marketing and Technical Documents Share the Same Issues

4. Business Reasons to Use XML for Creative Content

As it turns out, the business case for single-sourcing is not only just as applicable to marketing documentation – it is actually even more compelling.

This is true because the interrelationships among print and web marketing collateral are more complex, and discrepancies are directly “in the face” of customers. Furthermore, because marketing documents tend to be hand-crafted by graphic artists, significantly more labor is involved in making changes.

As a result of this:

• Even simple changes are extremely costly. This is especially true when outside design firms must be involved.
• Customer satisfaction suffers when documents are out of synch. When materials are inconsistent or outdated, customers get frustrated and lose trust.
• Real sales opportunities can be lost. Not only may customers be frustrated, but it’s also difficult to get materials for new products out quickly. Personalized sales materials – a dream of most sales organizations – become cost-prohibitive.
• The process lacks control. The process lacks control. Internally, processes are also inefficient and frustrating, and deliverables are often inadequately reviewed.

Yet despite these motivations, XML has not been adopted in this domain. This is due not to XML’s inability to effectively model marketing and creative content – but rather to the entrenched belief that XML publishing techniques can’t handle the highly graphical output formats. And even that applies not so much to the Web part of the equation – for it’s well-established that XML can produce beautiful Web pages – but rather to the printed or PDF part of the output that continues to be hand-crafted in proprietary page layout applications. And so we’re stuck…or so it would seem.

5. Five Key Insights

The premise of this whitepaper is that in fact single sourcing and XML-based publishing can be applied to marketing documents – especially for those documents that are subject to frequent “ripple-effect” changes, and for which the single-sourcing business case is most compelling. But to see this, we have to challenge the current way we’ve been thinking about the problem.

As further explored in the sections below, our premise is based on five specific insights:

1. Not all marketing documents require complex graphic arts – there are actually multiple levels of complexity.
2. The key documents to be single-sourced are at the lower levels of complexity.
3. We can associate formal requirements with each level, and map these to specific capabilities of tools and standards.
4. Based on this analysis, we find that today’s XML tools can handle a large class of the less complex but most interesting documents.
5. To make this work, however, we need to creatively apply Web page formatting techniques to print composition.

6. Insight #1: Multiple Levels of Complexity

We tend to think of all marketing documents in the same category, all needing the same kind of complex page layout and hand-crafted graphical design. However, a more careful look shows this is not true. In fact, there is a continuum of complexity, ranging from simple whitepapers and data sheets all the way to highly sophisticated magazine ads.

Figure 2: A Continuum of Complexity

As a framework for this analysis, we have created a formal 5-level classification scheme, representing increasing levels of page layout and publishing complexity, correlated with increasingly complex marketing content types. These levels are defined as follows:

• Level 1: Whitepapers, Case Studies and Press Releases
• Level 2: Newsletters, Data Sheets and Product Briefs
• Level 3: Product Brochures, Solution Guides and Catalogs
• Level 4: Cover Art, Ads and Inserts
• Level 5: Sophisticated Magazine Ads

7. Insight #2: The Interesting Documents are Less Complex

From the viewpoint of single-sourcing, most of the interest is at the lower levels of complexity. This is true because single-sourcing is most effective (and most needed) under the following conditions:

• When there are a large number of interrelated documents.
• When there are many redundant variations on the same content.
• When there are many parameters or phrases that need to be update when engineering changes occur.
• When the frequency of such changes is high.

As illustrated in the table below, these characteristics occur primarily at levels 2 and 3 of our model. Meanwhile, levels 4 and 5 – the most complex and hand-crafted of the content – might be difficult to single-source but have no need to do so. This material – cover art, ads, inserts, and other specialty pieces – should continue to be produced in Adobe or Quark. Level 1, on the other hand, is more similar to technical documentation and could be produced with either XML or other tools like Microsoft Word and FrameMaker. For our purposes, it’s really levels 2 and 3 that form the “sweet spot.”

Table 1

8. Insight #3: Requirements Can be Formally Mapped

As summarized in the table below, and detailed in Appendix A, each of the levels of our model can be associated with a specific set of requirements. This provides a formal metric by which we can characterize our model, and measure the ability of XML-based publishing tools and standards to handle each level:

Table 2

To validate that real-world documents follow this model, we took an informal survey across a wide variety of marketing collateral used in the technology industry. These examples were gathered from PDF files on each organization’s public Web site, and from other printed material used as standard sales collateral. Typically a number of documents were considered from each organization, not only from different content types but also across different products and product lines. While there were a few exceptions, nearly all the materials we examined fit the model reasonably closely.

The following table summarizes this analysis:

Table 3

9. Insight #4: XML Tools Can Handle the Requirements

Traditionally, XML-based tools might be used to handle level 1 of our model, since this type of content shares much in common with technical documents. At level 2 and above, a page layout tool like Adobe InDesign or Quark would be used.

With the introduction of XSL-FO and SVG, that situation has changed. XSL-FO is designed for page formatting, including flowing text, images and text boxes placed within page margins, columns and flow areas. However, it extends traditional page formatting to include:

• Arbitrary placement of text and graphics objects.
• Layering, overlapping and nesting of text/graphics objects.
• Flexible flows between objects.
• Flexible borders and shading.

Meanwhile, SVG is designed for vector graphics, including lines, curves, images and “fancy” text effects. Like Postscript and other page description models, SVG is based on placing objects within a 2-dimensional page coordinate system. Used in conjunction with XSL-FO, it extends basic page formatting capabilities to include:

• Advanced font/text effects.
• Text set on Bezier curves.
• Arbitrary rotation, skewing and scaling (both text and graphics).
• Advanced clipping and masking.
• Sophisticated color blending, shading and gradient effects .

As illustrated in the table below, if we carefully map the requirements to the capabilities of these standards, we find that XML has the power to support most of the requirements at levels 2 and 3, and even many of the needs of levels 4 and 5. Even today’s tools – which don’t yet implement all facets of these standards – can do a good job with levels 1 and 2, which is where much of the opportunity for single-sourcing occurs.

Table 4

10. Insight #5: We Can Apply Web Page Techniques to Print

XSL-FO can handle arbitrary placement of text and graphics boxes, and arbitrary layering of one on top of the other. Today’s XML tools, however, do not support these features of XSL-FO. So how can we produce the complex layouts typical of Level 2 and 3 marketing documents until XSL-FO support is more complete?

The answer, it turns out, is that we can borrow several powerful ideas from the world of Web page design: using tables to lay out objects on a grid, and placing text on top of an underlying background graphic. This is not really a leap of faith – after all, Web pages represent highly graphical, creative content that has had to overcome similar limitations in free-flowing HTML. It’s not surprising that we would use the same ideas here.

10.1 Using Tables to Lay Out Objects on a Grid

It has become standard practice to format creative Web pages as HTML tables. This reflects the long-standing graphic arts best practice of designing page layouts on a grid. We can apply this same technique to printed marketing material, in this case using XSL-FO tables.

10.2 Placing Text Over an Underlying Background Graphic

Another standard technique in Web site design is to use background shading and graphics over which HTML text and other graphics appear. This is also a useful model when working with XSL-FO.

XSL-FO – as supported in today’s XML tools – has the capability to insert a background graphic in the main “body” region. This background graphic can be viewed as a template upon which the text – and perhaps other graphics – are “overprinted.” In the XSL-FO model, all content of the XML document will be layered on top of the background graphic. So, for example, if we are “overprinting” text on top of a dark blue rectangle in the background, we would want to do so in a white or light-colored font.

10.3 Using SVG as the Background Graphic Format

Background graphics can be created in any tool you desire – even in Quark or Adobe if appropriate. But using SVG as the background graphic format (also supported by today’s XML and graphics tools), has some very special advantages. On the one hand, SVG can support virtually any graphical effect needed – including text that has to be skewed or arbitrarily rotated, or even set on a Bezier curve – or a graphic that also has to be skewed and layered behind a background.

But what if the background contains not only text, but also a photo or other graphic that is specific to the piece? Furthermore, what if the graphic needs to be skewed, or layered behind other background, so that simply overlaying it on top of the background won’t work?

In that case, we can take advantage of another aspect of SVG: since it is expressed in XML, it can be dynamically built from other XML data through an XSLT transform. Therefore special text and graphics can be dynamically inserted in the SVG background graphic at publication time – personalizing the background appropriately right before it is used. The figure below shows how this flow would be architected:

Figure 3: Using XSLT to Dynamically Build the SVG Background

11. Putting It All Together: A Comprehensive Example

The following figure indicates how all these techniques can be used together in a real example. Each of these steps is then explained in detail below:

Figure 4: Use of All the Techniques in a Comprehensive Example

11.1 Start With a Standard Data Sheet Template in SVG Format

Using this approach, we start with a simple SVG template that represents the standard background design for a data sheet or other creative piece. This might look something like the example below:

 <svg width="200" height="300" version="1.1"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
<text x="5" y="18" font-family="Verdana" font-size="12" fill="red">[PRODUCT NAME]</text>
<line x1="5" y1="18" x2="195" y2="18" stroke="black" stroke-width="1" stroke-dasharray="1,1"/>
<text x="55" y="26" font-family="Verdana" font-size="10" fill="blue">[PRODUCT TYPE]</text>
<image x="140" y="50" width="50" height="240" preserveAspectRatio="xMinYMin meet"
transform="skewX(1)" xlink:href="TemplatePhoto.jpg"></image>
<image x="5" y="245" width="120" height="30" preserveAspectRatio="xMinYMin meet"
xlink:href=“[PRODUCT PHOTO]”></image>
<rect x="5" y="275" width="190" height="20" fill="red" stroke="none"/>
</svg> 

11.2 Dynamically Add the Product Photo and SVG Header

We then use an XSLT transform to dynamically personalize the SVG using data contained in the XML source file. Here is how this data might be represented as XML attributes in the source:

 <product name = “Phaser 8400” type = “Color Printer” photo = “Phaser8400.jpg”>
<intro>
<title>The obvious choice for color printing.</title>
<para>24 page-per-minute print speed. A 500 MHz processor. The fastest first-page-out time of any color
printer. Stunning, rich color output on virtually any media. All at a price far below what you’d expect to…
[etc.] 

11.3 Use an XSLT Transform to Assemble the Final SVG Background

The personalized SVG file created by the XSLT might look something like this:

 <svg width="200" height="300" version="1.1"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
<text x="5" y="18" font-family="Verdana" font-size="12" fill="red">
Phaser 8400</text>
<line x1="5" y1="18" x2="195" y2="18" stroke="black" stroke-width="1" stroke-dasharray="1,1"/>
<text x="55" y="26" font-family="Verdana" font-size="10" fill="blue">
Color Printer</text>
<image x="140" y="50" width="50" height="240" preserveAspectRatio="xMinYMin meet" transform="skewX(1)"
xlink:href="TemplatePhoto.jpg"></image>
<image x="5" y="245" width="120" height="30" preserveAspectRatio="xMinYMin meet"
xlink:href="Phaser8400.jpg"></image>
<rect x="5" y="275" width="190" height="20" fill="red" stroke="none"/>
</svg> 

11.4 Handle the Grid Effects by Formatting Text as an XSL-FO Table

Once the personalized SVG background is created, we use a second XSLT transform to merge XML source data into the XSL-FO style template – including the personalized SVG background graphic we just produced. The result might look like this:

 <fo:layout-master-set>
<fo:simple-page-master margin-right=".25in" margin-left=".25in" margin-bottom=".25in"
margin-top=".25in" page-width="8.5in" page-height="11in" master-name="page">
<fo:region-body background-image="Background.svg" background-color="white"
margin-right="0in" margin-left="0in" margin-bottom="0in" margin-top="0in"/>
<fo:region-after region-name="xsl-region-after" extent=".5in"/>
<fo:region-before extent=".25in"/>
</fo:simple-page-master>
[etc.] 

11.5 Compose Using an XSL-FO Composition Engine

This file can then be composed by the XSL-FO composition engine. The composed text (laid out on a grid within an XSL-FO table) will be overlaid on the dynamically-assembled SVG background graphic.

11.6 Handle the Next Page the Same Way

Because creative marketing materials are usually composed on a page-by-page basis (hence the common use of “page layout” programs), each of the pages will go through the process described above.

Just as is done in Quark or Adobe, however, this will leverage the fact that high-volume creative materials follow standard page layout templates. For example, all double-sided product briefs will typically have a standard template for the front page, and a different standard template for the back page. Therefore all double-sided product briefs can leverage the same SVG background templates, and all will be composed using the same set of XSLT transforms.

12. Summary

Sales and marketing documents are the next frontier for XML-based single sourcing. There is a compelling business case, and the technology is available to do it.

In creative marketing materials, especially data sheets, product briefs, brochures and catalogs, small changes occur all the time. In the absence of single sourcing, even a small change requires researching all impacted documents and individually updating each one. This process can be very time-consuming and expensive, especially when updates can only be made by skilled graphic designers or outside design firms.

Up to now, it’s been assumed that XML-based single-sourcing techniques can’t be applied to creative marketing materials because page layouts and artwork are too sophisticated. Although some marketing documents have extremely complex formats, most use a simpler column/grid design. With the right approaches, today’s XML tools can already handle a large class of these documents. Enhanced XSL-FO and SVG support will soon be able to handle many of the rest.

Certainly, it doesn’t make sense to use XML for highly creative, one-off specialty pieces like cover art, magazine ads and product inserts (levels 4-5 in our model). However, we have shown how today’s XML tools can in fact be used to maintain highly graphical and highly volatile sales collateral, web pages, and product catalogs (levels 2-3 in our model) – all from a single source of XML information.

With this exciting new capability, we can:

• Significantly reduce the cost and complexity of maintaining marketing documentation.
• Increase the consistency and accuracy of this documentation.
• Dramatically decrease the cycle times to make updates.
• Increase the overall level of control over this process.
• Gain competitive edge by leveraging the latest technology in areas where others haven’t.

Appendix 1. Detailed Analysis of XML Feature Support

Appendix 1.1 Features Available in Current XML Tools

Necessary to Support Level 1:

• Support for standard multi-column layout
• Support for simple column/page text flow
• Support for objects that span columns
• Arbitrary font and font size for specific characters in a line
• Selectable font colors
• Floating images (limited)
• Ability to specify borders (lines) for a text box
• Rotation of an entire page by 90 degrees (portrait vs. landscape)
• Rotation of a graphics frame by 90 degrees (typically 90 and 270 only)
• Text wrapping around a rectangular text box (limited)

Necessary to Support Level 2:

• Ability to format the entire page as a table (grid)
• Ability to specify background shading for an entire page
• Ability to specify a background graphic for an entire page
• Text box border colors (all borders the same)
• Text box border weights (all borders the same)
• Ability to specify arbitrary RGB colors

Appendix 1.2 Additional Features Available in Full XSL-FO

Necessary to Support Level 3:

• Sidebar headings
• Floating images (full)
• Placing of text boxes on a grid
• Arbitrary placement of a text box on the page
• Arbitrary placement of a graphic on a page
• Multi-column text boxes (with flow between columns)
• Rotation of a graphics frame by 90 degrees (unlimited)
• Selectable background colors for a text box
• Text wrapping around a text box
• Shadowing of text
• Selectable text shadow colors
• Selectable text shadow offset
• Rotation of a text box by 90 degrees
• Rotation of text inside a text box by 90 degrees
• Shadowing of a text box
• Selectable text box shadow offsets
• Selectable level of transparency for text boxes
• Ability to anchor one text box inside another
• Rotation of a graphic by 90 degrees within a frame
• Ability to create text boxes as bleeds in the margin
• Ability to bleed graphics into the margin

Necessary to Support Level 4:

• Text wrapping completely around a rectangular clipping path
• Transparent text boxes (to be set on top of a graphic)
• Ability to position graphics frames and text boxes in layers
• Custom tab stops inside text boxes or table cells
• Support for CMYK printing
• Text box border colors (separately for each border)
• Text box border weights (separately for each border)
• Text box border dashed lines (separately for each border)
• Selectable text box borders

Necessary to Support Level 5:

• User-defined hyphenation and justification rules - partial
• User-defined kerning rules (space between two characters) - partial
• User-defined word space tracking rules (space to the right of a character)
• Horizontal scaling of type (expanded and condensed)
• Arbitrary baseline shift for a particular character
• Vertical alignment within a text box
• Text path set on a Bezier curve
• Alignment of text on a diagonal (line)
• Alignment of text on an arbitrary Bezier curve

Appendix 1.3 Additional Features Available in SVG

Necessary to Support Level 4:

• Ability to specify shading % as well as colors
• Ability to specify blends of colors
• Support for raised initial caps
• Support for drop caps
• Arbitrary rotation of a graphics frame
• Arbitrary rotation of a graphic within a frame
• Support for shading gradients in backgrounds
• Support for patterns in backgrounds
• Selectable text box shadow colors
• Selectable text box color shades
• 3-dimensional shadowing of a text box
• Selectable text box inset
• Different insets on various text box edges
• Automatic re-sizing of a text box upon overflow
• Automatic re-sizing of a graphics box upon overflow
• Ability to specify clipping paths for graphics
• Lines with arrowheads

Necessary to Support Level 5:

• Ability to specify multiple types of linear and circular blends
• Manual kerning between specific characters
• User-defined tracking rules (space to the right of a character)
• Negative horizontal tracking for a specific character
• Manual tracking for a specific character
• Manual word space tracking between two specific words
• Arbitrary horizontal scaling of type
• Vertical scaling of type (expanded and condensed)
• Arbitrary vertical scaling of type
• Ability to skew (as opposed to simply rotate) a graphic
• Support for masked text
• Arbitrary rotation of a text box
• Arbitrary rotation of text inside a text box
• Arbitrary angling of text within a text box
• Arbitrary skew for a text box
• Polygon frames
• Text wrapping completely around an arbitrary clipping path
• Text flowed inside an arbitrary clipping path
• Running text inside the “holes” in a picture
• Lines set on Bezier curves
• Dashed lines with rounded vs. square endcaps
• Dashed lines with pointed vs. rounded miter

Appendix 1.4 Features Only Available in Quark or Adobe InDesign

Necessary to Support Level 5:

• Arbitrary column widths
• Fractional point sizes
• User-defined hyphenation and justification rules - full
• Manual hyphenation for a specific line
• Hanging punctuation (ending punctuation outside the main body)
• Different horizontal justification for lines within a text box
• Arbitrary line count for drop caps
• Vertical and horizontal flipping of text
• Text set on an arbitrary polygon shape
• Dashed lines with stripes
• Support for Pantone colors
• Support for half-toning

XHTML rendition made possible by SchemaSoft's Document Interpreter™ technology.