Publishing is a challenging and complex business. Content moves through many processes—authoring and editing, design, composition, file outputs—and each is a world to itself. And of course, there’s the ever-challenging role of managing everything.
With so many complexities across starkly different processes, there is always an opportunity to streamline something and improve overall efficiency. The best way to do that is through automation.
Many publishing processes are tedious and repetitive, making them prime candidates for automation. The biggest efficiency gains can be found in the most tedious processes, so it’s a good idea to start there.
One of the most tedious parts of publishing is the composition and layout phase—the good news is, there are some powerful ways to automate it.
How to automate publishing
Structured content
The key to publishing automation is structured content.
In this context, the word “structured” means that semantic styling has been applied to the content.
Basically, structuring means tagging your content in a way that identifies what it is—tags like title, heading one, heading two, body, and caption are some examples of this. You could use XML or paragraph styles in Microsoft Word to achieve this, or you could create your own tagging system.
You should structure your content as early as possible in the content creation process. It will make it much easier to transform your content into different formats, reuse content fragments across publications, and integrate with other systems.
Benefits of structured content
Well-structured content unlocks the power of publishing automation. With structured content, it’s possible to automate:
- Tables of contents
- Tables of illustrations
- Tables of tables
- Index updates
- Cross-reference updates
- Conditional content: insert or remove
- Black line or redline editions
- Metadata
- Accessibility features
- Outputs in multiple formats
Authoring tools
Microsoft Word
Everyone knows about Microsoft Word—it’s the most popular word processing tool in the world, and it’s been around for decades.
Word’s wide adoption has made it a convenient generalist tool, and with the help of vendor add-ins providing specialist features, repetitive tasks can be automated.
Typefi Orion is an example of a Word add-in that enables some automation using content written in Word. It can perform automatic cleanup, styling and reference checking, and it enables you to export XML directly from Word.
Typefi Writer is another Word add-in that works with Typefi’s automated publishing platform to enable automated composition using Adobe InDesign. Using Typefi Writer, you can easily apply structure and publish automatically directly from Word.
Outside of using a specialist add-in, any automations based on Word content must rely on the deliberate use of paragraph and character styles. It’s not difficult to do this, but you need to implement this early to maximise the benefits.
XML editors
While Microsoft Word takes a generalist approach (using styling and formatting to structure the content), other authoring tools take an XML-first approach.
In the past, working with XML meant hiring specialist editors trained to use highly technical XML tools, but that’s not the case today. Modern products such as Fonto and Oxygen XML Web Author have made XML authoring accessible to anyone.
The primary benefit of these tools is that content structure can be automatically applied (and validated for accuracy) right within the editor, which reduces downstream errors. Additionally, because the content is structured during authoring, automations can be implemented more easily and in less time.
Content management
Keeping your content organised and accessible is another crucial part of publishing automation. Luckily, there’s a plethora of software platforms out there designed just for this purpose.
This type of software is called a Content Management System, or CMS. The CMS manages your content and metadata through the entire project lifecycle. Many of these platforms can also integrate with XML web editors to enable authoring and review within the CMS.
Many processes can be automated within Content Management Systems. Nearly every single one has an API that enables sending content from the CMS to various other tools and bringing content back into the CMS.
For example, you could create an automated workflow to pass content from your CMS to an automated composition tool like Typefi, then generate a PDF and pass it back to the CMS.
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is just one well-known CMS in the publishing space. Other common publishing Content Management Systems include MarkLogic, SiteFusion, and Componize.
Composition and layout
In a traditional publishing workflow, composition and layout are done manually by a specialist team of designers using layout design software such as Adobe InDesign.
The design team imports the content into the layout software, defines all the publication’s styles (like colours and fonts), adjusts the type, lays out every page, and exports to the final output format—and they do it all manually.
That amount of slow, manual work is why the composition and layout phase is the single most tedious part of the publishing process. That means it’s ripe for automation!
Outsourced composition
Publishers typically hire a large in-house design team or outsource the entire composition process. There are benefits and drawbacks to both methods.
Outsourcing might seem like an easy win since you essentially pay someone else to compose your documents, but it can be a significant bottleneck.
Here’s an example of a typical outsourced composition workflow:
- Pages are manually composed by the composition vendor.
- The vendor sends the composed pages to the publisher for review as a digital PDF or print proof.
- The publisher marks up the PDF files (or printed proofs) with changes and corrections, then sends them back to the composition vendor.
- The composition vendor makes the requested edits manually in the InDesign document.
- The vendor generates PDFs or proofs again, then sends them to the publisher again.
- The review and edit process repeats until all pages are approved by the publisher.
See why this might not be such an easy win?
With so much back-and-forth, this process quickly becomes time-consuming (especially if working across time zones). It’s also extremely error-prone as it relies on humans to manually make edits based on the publisher’s markup.
On top of that, the composition vendor only applies your edits within the design and layout software. That means your composed files end up out-of-sync with the source content, which results in more work later to edit the source or convert the composed documents back to the source format.
In-house composition
In-house composition might seem like a better option than outsourcing because there’s no middleman, but it’s still expensive and time-consuming.
It costs a lot of money to hire people, especially those skilled enough to perform composition and layout tasks with a high level of quality.
You’ll have to hire quite a few people too if you want to get anything done quickly, because your in-house team will still have to do all the manual tasks mentioned earlier.
This is where the power of automated publishing really pays dividends.
Automated in-house composition
With automated publishing software, you can perform in-house composition with a small team of just a few designers, save heaps of time, and cut costs.
Typefi automated publishing software is one such tool.
Typefi is built on Adobe InDesign, the most popular page layout software in existence. It works using InDesign templates and structured content, and it can compose up to 1000 pages per hour automatically.
Experienced InDesign users can easily create templates for use with Typefi. Each document type needs a template, but once the template is created, you can reuse the template for future publications and produce a composed document in just a few minutes.
A small team of designers can easily handle all the work needed to publish documents automatically with Typefi—and your designers will have more energy to focus creating great designs because they won’t have to do mind-numbing manual page layout all day.
Typefi can also produce multiple output formats simultaneously, automatically generate complex elements like tables, footnotes and mathematical notation, and help you publish in multiple languages faster. It can even produce accessible documents automatically!
Book a demo of Typefi automated publishing software to learn more and see how it works.
Benefits of automated publishing workflows
The biggest benefit of automated publishing is that you can get your publications to market faster. That’s a pretty significant benefit when it can take months to compose a single publication.
But there are many other benefits too. Publishing automation can help you:
- Eliminate human errors
- Make edits in minutes, instead of hours
- Publish in multiple languages faster
- Make publications accessible without extra effort
- Produce multiple output formats simultaneously
- Cut out the middleman and keep everything in-house
- Establish consistent design and branding
And once you fully realise these benefits, you’ll unlock another, less tangible one too.
By freeing your team from repetitive tasks, they’ll have more mental space and time to engage with more meaningful work. That means your team will be able to focus on creativity and strategic planning instead of mind-numbing tedium.
It’s really a win-win-win: you save money, save time, and lower your stress levels—and that’s truly priceless.
Damian Gibbs
Solutions Consultant | South Africa
Damian started out as an apprentice typesetter over 20 years ago at a leading South African educational publisher, and from the start was curious about the opportunities that digital technologies bring to publishing. He transitioned to general market publishing and eventually became a service provider to local and offshore publishers covering a diverse range of publishing markets, all requiring varying workflows and output requirements.
Damian has extensive experience working with publishers to develop and support automated publishing workflows and transition from pure print to digital outputs such as web, e-books, and CMS publishing.