Composition
Newgen offers a “true” XML-first composition workflow in which only one stream of data, the XML data, is used throughout the prepress cycle. All other deliverables—print files, (X)HTML files, Web PDFs—are created from this single data stream, and corrections at any stage are incorporated only into the XML. The typesetting engine in this workflow, which can be InDesign, 3B2, or XPP, uses only the XML input and an underlying template to produce pages: there are no intermediate “conversion” steps.
Publishers who use an XML-first workflow adopt one of two approaches: either pages are flowed entirely automatically in the typesetting software or some level of manual intervention is allowed to improve the visual appearance. To preserve the integrity of the XML in the latter approach, processing instructions can be inserted into the XML. These are invisible to an XML parser and then can be left in the XML or stripped out automatically at the time of final delivery.
