CHAPTER 4.2

4 . 2 Stages of Document Processing

What are the stages a document passes through as it moves toward completion? What happens in each stage and what role does a document processing system play? We will now examine these questions, as well as some other useful practices.
4 . 2 . 1 The Phases of the Process

Let's examine the six phases in the document creation process. These phases are design, writing, illustration, editing, production, and distribution.
DESIGN

Using a document processing system to design a publication invites many possibilities. The document has both a visual appearance and a logical design. The order of the items, such as the cover page, the table of contents, the chapters, the appendixes, and the index, makes up the logical structure of a document.
Style sheets and project-wide templates define the document's visual appearance. They must work within the framework of a document's logical structure. Properly used styles can help make a document conform to a specified document structure. This structure may be mandated by corporate standards or other factors.
WRITING

Writing with a document processing system is different from writing without one. The supplementary tools such as grammar and spelling checkers, thesaurus, and reference guides aid the process of writing.
Sometimes these tools are part of the system. At other times, they are utilities that can be used with many word processors that are not directly tied to a particular system. However, you can invent systemspecific personal tricks to take advantage of system capabilities. For example, some systems allow text to be hidden based on some condition, such as a comment or other userdefined property.
To take another example, while writing this book, I created a paragraph tag called editorial, which I used to keep temporary comments to myself. Sometimes I would print out all paragraphs with the tag editorial, effectively producing a "to do" list of tasks left on the book.
You can use this trick, in one form or another, on many systems. This and other capabilities were created for other purposes, but as you become more experienced with a particular system, you learn tricks and use them as you write.
ILLUSTRATION

Integrating graphic illustrations or photographic images with the text of a document is one of the more troublesome and complex areas of electronic publishing. The publishing system must be able to include graphics, but it must not necessarily be able to display the graphics on the screen.
As for clip art, you can't simply buy a collection blindly. You must know whether it will work with your publishing system and what kinds of manipulations you will be able to accomplish. (See the Clip Art section in the Resources appendix for more information.)
EDITING

Electronic publishing systems don't really provide much help in the editing phase. Instead, someone must review the text and check the content. However, on some systems, you can mark up the text electronically using underlines, strikeouts, and color.
For electronic markup to work, everyone on the project must agree on its meaning. When several people are involved with the same document, one important consideration is access. Permissions for access to the files must be properly set up. It's also important to have some sort of versioning or lockout system so that people don't accidentally write on each other's files.
Another problem that occurs when many people work on a document stems from font usage. The WYSIWYG systems can display only the fonts that are available on the computer. Everyone on the project must have the same set of fonts so that the document will print and appear correctly on the screen.
PRODUCTION

The usual way of preparing a document for printing is to create a series of PostScript files. (Yes, it's true that not everyone must create PostScript, but it's as close to a universal standard as the world has.) If your publication will be printed at a service bureau you must be sure that the bureau has all the fonts you need. The high quality printers of 1200 dpi (dots per inch) or more will also print patterned areas very differently that standard laser printers do. A 50% gray pattern will appear much darker on a standard 300dpi laser printer than on a 1200dpi printer. Halftone images will also have a very different overall lightness. Color printing is a totally specialized art; if you're using color printing, don't try it yourself, get a trained professional.(8)
DISTRIBUTION

You can distribute electronically produced documents in two ways: through traditional paper distribution channels and through electronic distribution. The Web and Internet have become the medium of choice for the electronic distribution of documents. CD-ROMs still provide a good mechanism for mass distribution without the network hassle.(9) If you are writing a document that will be electronically browsed, you will probably want to arrange the visual appearance appropriately.
Electronic distribution also brings up the problem of run-time software. To broaden your potential market, the electronic document you want to distribute must run on as many systems as possible. Web documents that take advantage of specific vendor "enhancements" will not be viewable with all browsers. (See Section 9 . 11 The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in Chapter 9 Case Studies for an example of a Web site which take account of different browser capabilities.) You may want to explore the possibility of converting the document to several formats.
4 . 2 . 2 Recommended Practices

Just as software engineering practices provide a method for controlling and managing the software creation process, document engineering provides a method for controlling and managing the document creation process. Document engineering is not a genuine field of study...yet.(10) But let's discuss what may be the key elements of this new field.
Good conventions for naming the document elements, such as paragraph tags and styles, are as important as good naming conventions in software development. Although a strict comparison to software engineering quickly falls apart, keep in mind that the document you are creating must be processed before it can be printed or displayed.
Concurrent engineering (CE)(11) is another field of study from which you can draw a number of parallels to electronic publishing. Design for manufacturing, one aspect of CE, is an approach in which a designer of an electronic circuit board, for example, selects component parts, based not only on functionality but also on availability. An amusing story from the book A Whack on the Side of the Head illustrates this point:
One of my manufacturing clients has a "single-sourced" capacitor designed into a circuit-board his company was producing. Manufacturing people typically go out of their way to avoid single-sourced parts, i.e., those produced by only one outside vendor. They reason that if only one vendor is producing a particular sub-component, then an entire manufacturing group can be idled if anything happens to the vendor's capability to produce.
Things were fine until the vendor had production problems and could no longer meet demand. My client spent a lot of time attempting to track down more capacitors, but was unsuccessful. Finally, he went back through five layers of management to the design department to see how critical this capacitor was, and if it would be possible to use a replacement. When the design engineer was asked why this particular capacitor had been chosen, he replied, "I chose it because it's blue, and it looks good on the circuit board." The designer had never bothered to consider what impact such a choice would actually have on getting the product out the door. His tunnel vision had prevented him from even looking for such a problem.(12)
Similar problems occur in electronic publishing. A graphic arts department may design a page layout without any consideration of the fonts available for printing. A complicated multicolumn layout may be virtually impossible for the system used by other staff, but simple with the system used by the designer. Similarly, design for a home repair manual may be fine for paper printing, but on-line viewing may require a larger screen and different layout.
Concurrent document engineering makes a great deal of sense. In practical terms, this means that you should find out if the people or service bureaus that will be involved with the document have all the necessary resources, such as fonts and software. If the document is intended for electronic distribution, you should check things like run-time software and platform portability. Early on, bring in the people involved in the later stages of the process. Printers may have advice on color separations, and this advice may affect the way you input images into the document. Internet service and Web site providers may have recommended Web browsers and display conventions.
Good document management is another practice you should follow. (See Chapter 8 Document Management for a more through discussion of these issues.) Simply put, the most important aspect of document management is to have a clear understanding of exactly what you need to manage. Fonts, collections of styles, template documents, and so on, must be clearly identified and should be placed under a central configuration control system.
Now that we've discussed the various types of document processing systems and some of their functions, let's turn to the issue of markup. Markup is the basis for the major document standards and is a fundamental concept used in virtually all document processing.

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