CMS to print – Postgraduate Prospectus

A little while ago, I wrote a post about our initial engagement with using Xtags as a conduit between Drupal and QuarkXPress.

Our first publication produced using this method – the Postgraduate prospectus – is now in the final stages of print. The process worked well for the most part – once the idiosyncracies of the redesigned prospectus were catered for. A retrospective meeting of the process highlighted a couple of issues with character encoding and extraneous carriage returns after a list, which will be investigated in time for the technology to be adapted to produce the Undergraduate prospectus this autumn.

I hope to be able to spend at least some of the time for developing the Undergraduate prospectus to genericise the processing somewhat – perhaps using some form of rules engine, so that we can produce a greater number of publications with fewer code changes, and perhaps abstract the entire processing engine away from being Drupal-specific into something which can accept (annotated, perhaps with a DTD or similar) input from a variety of sources.

I would be interested to hear from anyone who has any experiences with doing similar!

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