[thelist] Ideas Please (Integrating web Content with a Print Medium)

Dan Romanchik dan at danromanchik.com
Thu Oct 17 15:16:02 CDT 2002


I did something similar to this on a website for a weekly newsletter. The
content was a big list of scrap metal prices. Each week, the reporters would
input the prices via forms I created. This data would be input to a
database.

Next, a designer would go to a particular webpage that extracted the data
and inserted a number of PageMaker tags. The output was a text file, which
the designer then imported into PageMaker, made a few manual tweaks, and
then sent to the printer. No XML was involved.

If you work on it long enough, you can get it to the point where there is no
human intervention involved, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort. It is,
after all, only a yearly publication. You should be able to do 95% (very
rough guess) of the formatting, but that last 5% is going to take forever.
imho, it would be much cheaper to just have a designer do the last 5%.

Good luck!

Dan
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Romanchik - Web Developer
dan at danromanchik.com, 734-930-6564


----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian W. Reaves" <brian at brianreaves.com>
To: "eVolt List" <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Sent: Thursday, October 17, 2002 3:59 PM
Subject: [thelist] Ideas Please (Integrating web Content with a Print
Medium)


> Here's the big picture:
> - Currently a yearly print publication of professionals is created and
> mailed to subscribers & the listed professionals (About 200 pages)
> - They want to move towards a web version of the publication
> - In the mean time the yearly printing has to continue until they can
phase
> it out
> - As soon as the site is live it will replace in-house task such as: data
> collection, data edits, subscriptions, and renewal notices, while allowing
> the professional to access and edit their entered information On-Line
> - So far, no big deal...
> - The client want to send the printer, each year, to the site to get the
> content instead of having to format it and send the files in-house
> - The printer needs the content in a print ready file format (PDF, Quark
> PageMaker, there may be others)
> - The site will remain dynamic through out
> - Has anyone created a system to do just this?
>
> My guess is I will have to get into XML (Which I do not know yet) and also
> use CSS printing options.
>
> If anyone would be interested in doing this element of the project as a
> sub-contractor, lets discuss it further. If you have more questions, just
> ask: brian at brianreaves.com.
>
> Please advise...
>
> TIA,
> B.
>
>
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