Electronic Authoring and Publishing to the Web, CD-ROM and SGML November '96 Special Meeting

Speaker: Adobe Systems Meeting notes by: Craig Cardimon Visit the Adobe web site (http://www.adobe.com) for additional information and demonstrations.

A special product demonstration seminar was given by Adobe Systems Inc. at the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) at 3501 Market Street Nov. 25. "Electronic Authoring and Publishing to the Web, CD-ROM, and SGML" is much easier than it was just a short time ago, especially if you call upon the services of FrameMaker+SGML, Adobe Acrobat, and Adobe PageMill. Using such software, you can "repurpose" documents, that is, you can import items created for one environment (i.e., hardcopy) and convert them into a format suitable for publishing in another (i.e., the Web). This report is a combination of my notes as well as Adobe's marketing materials. FrameMaker+SGML FrameMaker+SGML software helps you easily create SGML documents, providing a user-friendly environment that integrates context-sensitive editing, interactive structure view, word processing features, graphics support, WYSIWYG formating, and automated page composition. FrameMaker+SGML provides native SGML element and attribute support. This means element and attribute declarations in a document type definition (DTD) can be directly imported. The document can then be edited and formatted in a WYSIWYG setting and exported as an SGML document. Adobe Acrobat Adobe Acrobat 3.0 helps you easily publish documents online. Electronic files or paper documents can be converted in Portable Document Format (PDF), which may then be posted online or sent anywhere via email or CD-ROM. Faxes, letters, memos, spreadsheets, technical documents, contracts, forms, proposals, presentations, and financial reports may be made available online for your coworkers or even the entire company to see. How many of you have spent hours retyping documents so they could be published online, because the documents themselves wouldn't scan? I know I've spent a small lifetime doing just that. Well, good news. The Acrobat Capture Plug-in will now do that for you, recognizing text and graphics in the scanned image and creating a PDF file that's ready to go online. PDF files are searchable and even retain the formatting of the original paper documents. Adobe PageMill While Acrobat will create documents for access online, Adobe PageMill will help you build Web pages, and you don't have to know a thing about HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), tags, URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), or any Internet protocols. Seeing it demonstrated, I realized PageMill offers drag-and-drop and point-and-click generation of frames, tables, forms, text fields, buttons, server-side includes, font-sizes, and type styles. When I build a page at work, I have to create a button with our old graphics software, convert it into a gif, FTP (File Transfer Protocol) it onto our site, and manually link it up. Anything fancy such as tables or forms must be hand-coded. To download a demonstration version of PageMill, visit http://www.adobe.com/apps/pagemill. As we can see, however, new software is rendering obsolete the extensive retyping (or "reauthoring") and hand coding you used to have to do to publish documents on the Web. Repurposing existing technical documents to HTML and PDF formats for Web and even CD-ROM publishing is easier than ever before. To further explore these and other products, visit the Adobe site at http://www.adobe.com.

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