H&J that's Agile: Two screens, a Mac on the left and PC on the right, trumpet how TeamBase from Agile Enterprise can cross platforms adroitly, with stories justifying identically on both operating systems.

Steady progress puts sheen on NEXPO '99 editorial offerings

LAS VEGAS -- Years into the evolution of client-server technology, editorial front-end systems have become ever more powerful, efficient and stylish successors to the proprietary big iron of a decade ago.

NEXPO '99, the last NEXPO of the century, which was held here June 14-17, brought this evolution into sharper focus. While the big noise came from booths having a little -- or a lot -- to do with Adobe InDesign, a fair number of suppliers quietly displayed the fruits of their continuing efforts to refine solutions already at work.

As the decade ends, newspapers have to be in two places at once -- in print and on-line. As the new decade unfolds, newspapers will continue to morph into information companies, publishing in several media simultaneously and meeting new demands put on them by readers, advertisers and changes in publishing technology itself.

While digital spiders have spun the Web into virtually every newsroom and can be seen in more and more advertising and business offices everywhere, the traditional print needs are unchanged from the beginning of the decade -- indeed, the beginning of the century.

Publishers still demand reliable, fast, effective and cost-saving ways to get the news from dateline to pressroom.

Visits to a half-dozen booths at NEXPO '99 brought home how much multimedia oomph is put in front of reporters, editors and designers every day. In addition to the breadth of tasks newsroom systems now undertake routinely (remember when pagination was just 18 months away?), what is notable is the grace with which many systems do so much.

A catalog of Things We Do from the big iron era would feature word processing, wire collection, typesetting and messaging, with end-user efficiencies realized through intricately programmed defined keys. Often, the sizable potential of such systems was realized only by sizable papers.

Today's Things We Do catalog is heftier, slicker, crammed with choices and almost equally affordable by papers large and small. Its readers take for granted that now they can have not only word processing that leads to the printed or digital page, but multimedia file processing, with one workstation able to handle text, photos, graphics, pages and the Web.

The day of one-box-holds-all has finally arrived.

Boy, does it hold a lot.

Touring the floor
Much has changed in the three years since our last good look at editorial front-ends.

They're looking good.

Perhaps most striking was the strides made in integrating Microsoft Word and Quark XPress into seamless production environments -- a long lope from the initial efforts of the mid-'90s, when users were treated to agitated screens as Word files were fired off to XPress for justification and returned with line enders intact.

The process seemed Rube Goldbergian at best; now, it seems silky smooth, as a number of suppliers have teamed these applications with beefier platforms housing ever-faster processors.

A case in point is Agile Enterprise of Nashua, N.H.

Agile first appeared at NEXPO '93 in New Orleans. Frank Rizzo, then Agile's president and now its general manager, devoted two hours to trying to get a member of the trade press to grasp how TeamBase Special Edition worked.

He failed. There was something about this database stuff that just didn't click.

That database-centric system from the ambitious little company in Nashua (now a part of much-bigger Applied Graphics Technology of Rochester, N.Y.) was built with off-the-shelf tools, such as Microsoft Excel and Word, Adobe PageMaker and what would become the de facto standard application for page layout, Quark XPress.

In its early years, TeamBase found few takers. But recently, Agile has won new adherents -- it puts out Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report, plus eight daily newspapers, including the Daily Record of Parsippany, N.J. (Conflict-of-interest note: The Cole Group, publishers of this newsletter, recently consulted with the Times Publishing Co. of Erie, Pa., which has chosen an Agile system to replace its existing editorial front-end.)

This year at NEXPO, Rizzo had no problem communicating the sophistication and depth TeamBase has acquired over the years. For starters, page layout is simply slick, thanks to a combination of XPress library entries and what Rizzo called "a well-behaved" XPress XTension.

Well-behaved, indeed: TeamBase frees page designers from the truly tedious tasks of manually creating boxes in XPress, linking them and then flowing in text. They don't even have to drag-and-drop a template from a library -- now they can clump elements in a package together (text, photos, graphics, heads) and let TeamBase create the boxes as the package is dragged to the page.

Look, Ma, no hands, feet, toes -- or aggravation.

As with other systems, Agile uses eXtensible Markup Language (XML) tags to label blocks of copy as text, head (for web site or print), caption, byline and so forth.

Remember when the sequence of formats could determine whether film left the typesetter ready for the page or the trash? Sequence, smeequence. These tags are intelligent, Rizzo explained -- they'll take on the right presentation parameters for the designated destination medium regardless of their insertion order in a story.

TeamBase also illustrated recent advances in multiplatform functionality, as Rizzo worked alternately with a PC and a Mac to show how routine tasks could be done in either operating system with variations only in the interface. The same story justified in a PC and a Mac had identical line enders, as it should -- and on either platform, multiple editors can work on stories simultaneously, allowing pages to be closed by many hands at once.

Rizzo also displayed Agile's new photo archive and image-handling tools, which include a directory of photos that can be sorted by slug, scan date, caption and other pertinent fields. Those fields now are based on the International Press Telecommunications Council (Iptc) standard, but Agile (like others) is adopting the News Industry Text Format (Nitf) standard.

Once called to the screen, photos can be marked by an editor as approved, unapproved or rejected (which puts a diagonal line through the image and prevents use of it). Color changes in an image can be made with familiar Adobe Photoshop-style tools, but there are a couple of twists: International Color Consortium (ICC) profiles may be applied to photos as they enter the system, and two or more images may be marked and then a single profile applied to all of them simultaneously.

These and a score more features are available not only on a workstation running TeamBase, but through a web browser as well. Rizzo clicked on an image in his Internet Explorer window, then dragged it to an open Quark XPress page.

It was one of many ways drag-and-drop functionality has advanced from being just a way to move icons on a desktop, to taking its place alongside tapping the spacebar while typing between words.

It's simply second nature now.

The agony of the agate
Sports agate has been the final hurdle in converting many a paper to pagination, so a welcome sight was seen at two booths trumpeting agate-tamers.

Advanced Publishing Technology (APT) of Burbank, Calif., and Advanced Technical Solutions (ATS) of Wilmington, Mass., both capitalized on the rigid structure of Associated Press text transmissions to beat agate at its own game.

APT's approach, a budding product temporarily dubbed Z Agate, is separate from its ACT editorial system -- all you need is a Windows-based workstation and text from the AP.

Agate takes are dragged to the user's queue for formatting by Word 97 macros, which are customized for each newspaper based on the typography and other variables the customer gives APT. The macros first locate the AP keyword in an agate library, then scoot over the text, inserting some characters but deleting none -- unneeded characters are put into notes and deleted only on output.

The macro-based wonder works in Quark XPress as well as Word. An InDesign version is in the works, and APT is considering porting it to the Mac as an XPress XTension.

Within ACT, moving agate to a page was not as automated as massaging agate, but still, generating picture and text boxes was robotic. A user can enter design parameters in a text file, then drag-and-drop it to a page. A box of the right size will be created automatically, and corresponding text -- cutline, headline, pull quote -- appears within.

The ATS approach to corralling agate is different from Z Agate in that it toils out of sight. It also relies on identifying agate takes from their AP keywords, but the work is done on input as wire is collected, with all those AP fixed spaces replaced by Quark XPress tags. (With the requisite preparation, this magic can be applied to stocks and election returns as well.)

To cap the demo of NewsDesk Sports Agate, text was flowed into an XPress page with the same ease and speed as body copy. At this rate, sports agate pages now should qualify to be among the first to exit the old system.

ATS also showed how far along the management of jumps has come. Not only does an XTension generate jump lines and position them properly, but an editor can cut text on the first page and watch as lines are brought forward from the jump page automatically.

Who says you can't be two places at once?

Finishing touches
As the 1999 Editorial Front-end Get Reacquainted Tour wound down, it was evident many systems shared many facets.

Most, however, did not have a thermometer for reporters. That was the province of Wilkinson Scoop, a European solution marketed by Nova Publishing Systems Inc. of Auburn, Calif. The thermometer appears when page geometry is attached to a text file and story length is preordained; as the reporter types, the thermometer goes up until space runs out.

Most solutions did have database-centric designs, like OpenPages from American Computer Innovators Inc. of Amherst, Mass. This product stood apart because OpenPages doesn't ever close a page into the database, it saves elements -- and a page is an element. So, while it looks like a designer is saving a Quark XPress page to disk, in fact only the layout is stored as a Quark file.

When that page is called back to the screen, the contents are drawn from the database in what ACI calls "dynamic pagination." One advantage: Since the database is dipped into when the page is opened, changes made in stories on the page are updated automatically.

And if there's a hole yet to be filled, a story can be dragged and dropped from a directory into the hole -- the XPress get text command can go on a long vacation.

Another database-centric product, GuideLines, offers a nifty way to build lists for such things as entertainment guides, police blotters and weekly events. Marketed to smaller papers by John Juliano Computer Services Co. of Decatur, Ga., and designed and marketed to larger papers by PentaWave Inc. of Scottsdale, Ariz., GuideLines is tailor-made for the newsroom that has everything but enough people.

Instead of updating a text file week in and week out, and likely losing a listing or two in the process, GuideLines stores information that's cross-referenced by data field. For example, enter the name, address and phone number of a local venue, such as a stadium, and all events at the stadium will pick up the address and phone from the database.

If the phone number changes, it need be entered in the database only once -- saving time and ensuring that future publication of the phone number will be correct. In addition, data within fields can be sliced and diced, permitting an editor to specify just how much information will be published in a given publication.

Formatting for print is rendered simple through export profiles that embed the proper instructions for the destination application, such as XPress -- and properly configured, GuideLines can be accessed over the Web with a browser.

What's old is new again
"Powerful doesn't have to be complicated," said Werner Elhauge as he showed the print-side features of SAXopress, the handsome editorial front-end made by SAXotech of Denmark, the company Elhauge founded seven years ago.

In its home country, SAXopress is in use at four newspapers in five. An infant U.S. marketing agreement with Morris Communications Corp. of Augusta, Ga., was terminated in October. Now SAXotech is establishing its own U.S. office in Bethesda, Md. The first U.S. site is the 15,800-circulation evening Daily Sentinel of Rome, N.Y.

Sporting what Elhauge called "integrated mediaware," SAXopress is among those systems that processes text with Word and zips together pages with XPress, but also generates scads of Portable Document Format (PDF) files as pages are completed -- and gives users their choice of a Mac or PC to work on, and a web browser for full-fledged activity from afar.

Perhaps most important is that SAXopress is an amalgam, riding the crest of the Fifth Wave. Its interface -- simple, consistent and artfully done -- clearly is not shared by other systems. The feature set is extensive, and even includes an alternative to Word for text editing if a user wishes to take a digital path less traveled.

And yet, with Word and Quark underneath the hood, SAXopress is built on a foundation it neither designed nor laid, making it one of the emerging hybrid systems that adopts and adapts third-party software, develops its own enhancements (and some modules from scratch), and sends it to market with just enough of its own flavor to win attention in a crowd.

Elhauge suggested there's one other thing that SAXopress represents: Fifth Wave solutions are more likely to meet users' expectations.

As Elhauge put it, "You can buy this stuff, and it works."

-- Pete Wetmore

Advanced Publishing Technology,
(818) 557-3035,
e-mail: sie@advpubtech.com;
Advanced Technical Solutions,
(978) 657-6500,
e-mail: info@atsusa.com;
Agile Enterprise Inc.,
(603) 880-6440,
e-mail: frizzo@agilent.com;
American Computer Innovators Inc.,
(413) 256-1147,
e-mail: info@aci-openpages.com;
John Juliano Computer Services Co.,
(404) 377-9450,
e-mail: jjcs@jjcs.com;
NOVA Publishing Systems Inc.,
(530) 887-1795,
e-mail: sales@novapub.com;
SAXoTECH,
(301) 961-1942,
e-mail: info@saxotech.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, August 1999, Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved.