Drupal to print with Xtags

This is actually my first blog post here, so I guess I had better introduce myself. I’m Mark Fendley, and I have been looking at streamlining the process of content creation with regard to the differing media of print and the web.

Late last year, I was happy to be re-introduced to some software I used extensively a long time ago, QuarkXPress, and specifically to an add-in product by Em software – Xtags. Xtags is a form of markup language which enables users to create, position, and style content and manipulate the structure of a QuarkXPress document.

Simon Yeldon and I set about investigating how we could use Xtags as a translation layer between the output of a Drupal view and a Quark document. Initial investigations went well, and I have been refining the process ever since.

The result is that we now have a translation system which will take well-formed and marked-up content from a Drupal view, process it through a number of rules which perform direct string replacement and some conditional formatting, and output the resulting Xtags encoded content to the browser. An AppleScript dropped into the QuarkXPress scripts folder later and we have a single-step import selectable from a menu within Quark.

We are currently piloting this with the new Postgraduate Prospectus, ironically the most complex document, which will still require some manual tweaking around the edges of the managed content. Looking at some of our other printed publications, it appears (at our current limited level of analysis) that some are more formulaic and the process can be automated further, enabling us to add pages, apply master styles, and fill them with content completely automatically.

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