In this presentation from the 2024 Americas Virtual User Group, Chris Hausler, Director of Business Development at Typefi, and Don Moody, VP of Production at Publishing Concepts (PCI), discuss how PCI was able to achieve something pretty remarkable using Typefi automated publishing software.
PCI is in the business of telling stories. The company works with organisations including private high schools, colleges, universities, clubs, and military branches to capture stories from their members, compile them, and distribute them as beautiful published works for print and digital.
Before Typefi, PCI had to do all the composition and publishing work manually. Once the stories for a project were compiled, the design team would spend about one month laying out the publication and tweaking to make everything fit. In those days, building the index for one of these books took an entire week!
With Typefi automated publishing software, it now takes the team just 2 hours to create the entire book layout and the index, and multiple books can be done concurrently.
The key to this massive time savings is what PCI calls “the manifest.” In its two-part workflow, the manifest is created in the first phase. During this phase, Typefi is used to run each story through the book layout template to determine every possible size each story could be. At the end, a script runs to measure each story, and it returns a list of all the sizes for each story that would work for a given book.
PCI built its own tool to analyse that measurement data and figure out how to fit all the stories together to create the shortest possible book. The tool then creates the manifest, which is essentially just a list of where and how to place each story in the book. This is run through Typefi, and out comes a print-ready book!
It’s one of the most interesting Typefi use cases we’ve seen to date. Check out the video for more details about how it works.