What's new in IGP:Digital Publisher 5.11?

16 June 2016

Publishers, IGP:Digital Publisher, IGP:FoundationXHTML, Digital Production, Production, Multi-formats, PDF, ePub3, Static Sites.

IGP:Digital Publisher 5.11 is released with exciting new features.

Working at the leading edge of digital content production and delivery is not easy for the powerful "Digitize Once, Use Forever™" publishing framework IGP:Digital Publisher (DP).

While multiple print PDF editions are straight-forward to produce, the diversity of ePub2 and ePub3 reader features is complicated by Amazon's Kindle; plus the limited or arbitrary feature support (especially CSS) of many reading systems out there. Many of the DP updates and revisions are created to address the arbitrary selection of features and changes by various reading system vendors.

IGP:Digital Publisher 5.11 has a number of subtle updates and changes to ensure that creating ebook formats for ePub reading systems "variations on a theme" is always reliable plus the latest new features, system component updates and bug fixes.

The Major Changes

The IGP:Digital Publisher 5.11.0 updates can be read in detail on the Roadmap and Release Notes site. In summary:

Behind the scenes Apache and OpenSSL versions have been updated to address potential security issues associated with older versions.
Kindlegen has been upgraded to version 2.9. plus new and additional Kindle format generation limitations have been addressed, especially for complex books with large indexes and named lists.
Multi-language support has now been updated so ALL output packages and formats can be produced in any language combination.
A number of updates and new features have been added to the AZARDI:Interactive Engine. These primarily affect education publishers and those using the AIE modules in their ePub3 and static site publishing activities.

Just around the corner

While this version release is relatively minor, we have three very exciting and very big updates on the testing blocks for release in the very near future.

New Admin Interface

The new administration interface is due for launch very soon. It is under final testing by our team and a small group of licensees. This radically improves the productivity of the Administration interface, ease of use and customization options.

The original interface was designed for tablet use back in 2010 when tablets were an exciting new thing. As it happens no-one has, or is going to use a tablet for complex multi-format book publishing. It was well past time to retire the "good idea of the time" and bring everything into 2016.

Minimal Template with Enhanced Document Designer

For the past decade IGP:Digital Publisher has used a suite of templates for various trade and academic publisher requirements. The default templates were loaded with IGP:FoundationXHTML CSS styles for Writer, Print and Readers to cover every possible structure in various book categories.

The new Trade Minimal template strips virtually all CSS from the template and delegates that to IGP:Document Designer (DD).

In addition IGP:Document Designer now has a design library. This can have any number of book designs created and ready for instant action. A design can be assigned to a books' XHTML five instantly and changed at any time.

This drastically reduces the effort to get the print book design ready to go, and the ebook design still inherits from the print design for look and feel.

For publishers creating multiple print editions this means creating the hardcopy, paperback, large print and mass market editions is a few clicks to use a reliable and tested design rather than reworking templates for each format for each book.

Typography Automation

What if your typography rules such as line turns, paragraph turns and page turns can be handled completely automatically? That makes getting a book to the printers a matter of minutes instead of hours or days.

Arguably this is the most sophisticated processor we have developed for IGP:Digital Publisher. The objective is to have a typographically correct PDF generated for all PDF packages with a list of warnings where the processor was unable to make any required typographical changes. Typography Automation uses the unique PDF analytics power of our MOD51 module combined with unique and labour free typographic correction. We have no deadline for this module at present as it is still very much in the lab.

In Conclusion

We live in a fast changing world. For nearly a decade IGP:Digital Publisher has been the digital production reference tool for trade and academic books. In the last few years it has moved forward for institutional reports and most importantly multi-lingual, interactive education content. There is more to come.

This power and adaptability is all based on the rock-solid IGP:FoundationXHTML base, plus a development team saturated in digital content processing expertise. It is not just what you do that matters. It's how you do it that really makes the differences in productivity, quality and innovation.

Posted by Richard Pipe