What's New in IGP:Digital Publisher 7.7

IGP:Digital Publisher (DP) is a digital content production solution that converts HTML (with highly semantic CSS properties) into any package or format. THat includes print and other PDFs, eBooks and a lot more.

Publishers often want or need new features to address their particular content complexity, workflows, quality challenges and business demands. We try to add these new features on a monthly basis if the size of the feature is appropriate.

The job is adjusting processes and processors to address the change and new feature requirements; while ensuring the stability and future value of content already produced and stored in IGP:Digital Publisher is preserved.

The full release notes are available here

Productivity Features

Manuscript Importer Updates

A number of University Press clients have different article manuscripts submitted by multiple authors. These all have footnotes and/or end-notes. Rather than rework these in to a single manuscript they wanted to be able to import these into IGP:Digital Publisher one at a time as they are submitted and when revisions are submitted. 

Previously the Manuscript Importer assumed that a manuscript contained all articles and notes would be imported and nicely processed to book end-notes. It was now necessary to keep end-notes with each article on import and only process them to book end-notes when all final manuscript had been imported. This change was primarily a technical back-end configuration and setup change so there is nothing to be seen on the interfaces.

IGP:Digital Publisher has powerful footnote and note processing options already, but this change also required an update to the Notes Block Movement strategy with new options for creating the section headings in a backmatter Notes section.

Document Metadata Sync Updates

IGP:Digital Publisher is very powerful with metadata options but metadata was not automatically synced between the document creation form and the output Document Processing Instruction tool.

This was not an issue for standard front or backlist production of individual books, but now that IGP:Digital Publisher is moving to bulk document importing and exporting (IE: Hundreds of uploaded manuscripts at once) this needed to be updated.

Now when a document or multiple documents are created with a metadata spreadsheet upload the DPI metadata is updated automatically. Currently this only works for newly created documents.

AIE-Hotspots

There was a requirement from magazine publishers for their full pages to be displayed as images in an EPUB or WebSite. Their objective is to maintain their print presentation appearance but still making everything fully readable without having to zoom the image and scroll it side by side on the screen.

The various titles and headings on the page then had tap or click hotspots to open that section text as an HTML window. Of course it had to be fully responsive and work on all devices. In addition there was a requirement for additional interactivity such as Q&A (as illustrated).

IGP:Digital Publisher now has the production tools to allow multiple hotspots to be defined over an image of a document page. We use HTML5 -data attributes for this to allow this level of detail to be embedded into any HTML format or package.  The popup text blocks are associated with the hotspots by ID to bring up the associated text in an article or sub-article. The text can be as long or short as required.

We put a few pages up on the demonstration site. You can see it in action here. Click the AIE Hotspots option on the left menu.

Summary

IGP:Digital Publisher addresses the requirements of publishers to "Digitize once, Use Forever". This is achieved with sophisticated modularization which can be easily extended and modified for general or specific content packaging requirements. The powerful semantics of IGP:FoundationXHTML ensures that content tagged more than a decade ago can be instantly used at any time to create standard and new formats and packages.

Digital book formats have been changing slowly in the past few years but we are now getting requests for EPUB 3.1 and WebApp packages to name just two new formats. Publishers who are smart enough to use IGP:Digital Publisher will be able to instantly generate these packages without additional processing costs. 

IGP:Digital Publisher continues to deliver the lowest-cost and highest-quality production environment for valuable content of all types.

There were also a number of other smaller supporting processes and bug fixes. The full release notes for IGP:Digital Publisher 7.7 are available online here at learn.infogridpacific.com