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Where content meets technology

Oct 03, 2005

Bricolage for Print

There was a recent thread on the Bricolage mailing list about using Bricolage to support print as well as web publishing. Given Bricolage's history and focus on publishing magazines and other periodicals, I am not surprised that there were some good anwers. One of the respondents recommended creating presentation templates that write to an XML format that can be imported into Adobe InDesign CS. In InDesign, you can create style sheets where you map incoming XML tags to InDesign layouts. If you don't have Adobe InDesign, another option is to use Apache XML:FOP (pronounced Pho as in the Vietnamese food or Faux as in fake) which stands for Formatting Objects Processor. XML FOP is a very cool technology which takes an XML format and can output to different print formats with an emphasis on PDF.

By using this technique, you can get excellent re-use between your print and web content and you will also be able to leverage Bricolage's powerful workflow functionality.