TAKING PRINT DESIGN TO THE WEB

By: Howard I. Finberg Newspapers Must Push Design Expertise Online


The problem with predicting the future is that the darn thing keeps moving. Just as I'm ready to proclaim that this is the path we will all walk, the road shifts. I find this especially thorny when it comes to figuring out what newspapers will look like in the future.

Don't get me wrong: I am not a digital soothsayer who goes around shouting, "The End Is Near!" Printed news will be around for decades. What is hard to say is how those pages will look. The view down that path is hazy.

I still see the traditional newsprint version being very appealing. After all, the industry has pretty much figured out the "design thing." But, after judging a recent Web contest for newspapers, I was struck by the lack of impact in the way we present news on our Web sites. I came away from the contest more than a little dismayed. Our content is good; our presentation is often downright boring.

However, there are some technology developments on the horizon that point to change -- perhaps for the better. Catching my eye and lifting my hopes is Adobe Systems Inc.'s release of Acrobat Reader software for the Palm operating system, which runs on both Palm's Pilot and Handspring's Visor personal digital assistants.

Adobe has excitedly announced that its Palm OS Acrobat application will make it easier for companies to make documents, such as technical manuals, already in portable document format (PDF) available on portable computing devices. Yep, that's cool. The Adobe lab is cooking up even more exciting things that will have an impact on publishers trying to use their rich print design on the Web.

Adobe is working very hard to make Acrobat the pervasive cross-publishing platform engine by adding several important features. You'll find a hint of this in Acrobat 5.0. Look under the "File/Document Properties" menu and you'll see a reference to DocumentMetaData.

Metadata, which is "data about data," helps automatically organize information and make it accessible to Web site visitors. This is an important feature. Think about going to a library to find one book. You go to the catalog to see if the book is there and to determine its location. The catalog is the library's metadata. Without a catalog, you would have a hard time finding your book. On the Web, metadata is increasingly important for search engines because it helps organize and bring structure to online content. Metadata not only explains what's on the page but also can describe other elements, such as photographs. Once you describe these elements, it makes it easier for other applications or systems to display the original information that is true to the original publication's design.

The use of document metadata is just the first of several new tools or plug-ins that Adobe is working on, according to Gary Cosimini, business development director for Adobe's Cross Media Publishing Group. Future releases of Acrobat will accommodate more media types and more ways to see that data across various devices, even sending parts of a PDF document to Web-enabled cell phones.

Going with the flow

Pulling pieces from various documents doesn't work unless the documents' internal structure is maintained. Story jumps and column layouts need to be reflowed in a logical manner for the intended device. That's only possible if elements of the document are "tagged." Most publishing systems use some form of markup tags to describe a headline or a byline. That information is then used to drive the final printed output of a page.

Some vendors have taken the next step by converting those tags to hypertext markup language (HTML), the lingua franca of the Web. Until now, that's been good enough. But as our customers demand more and more visually sophisticated Web design, HTML doesn't cut it. It, too, locks the content into the design.

That's why everyone is excited about extensible markup language (XML), which is a much more flexible way of allowing publishers to design for multiple platforms. However, to make this work, you need to have all your content in a database and you need editing and publishing systems that can deal with print and digital devices. Or you need some kind of system in the middle to deal with it. And you'll need Macromedia Flash or another visually sophisticated program.

What Adobe now plans to do might make this easier. It plans to export a "tagged PDF" file to a number of different file formats -- RTF (rich text format), HTML, and XML.

OK, let's bring this back to what this means to newspapers.

First, almost all newspapers now output pages to imagesetters that use Adobe's PostScript page-description language. With PostScript, you can use Acrobat Distiller to convert page information to a file that maintains the look and feel of a newspaper. When Adobe's new "SaveAsXML" plug-in is released, a newspaper could publish an entire edition's content in a very accessible and organized way to devices that have yet to be designed.

Currently, publishing a PDF file means that the content -- the story -- is trapped inside the "look and feel of the document," said Cosimini. With these new Acrobat features, you can "free content" from the design of the page.

Reading a newspaper story in Acrobat might be fine if the story is contained on a single PDF page. Reading a story that jumps is difficult, as you need to "turn the page" to the continuation of the article. And God help you if there are related stories elsewhere in the publication.

Imagine being able to click on that story in the visual display of the paper and being able to read the entire story in a way that is appropriate for the device you are using. Up pops the entire story, with any related links. Or up pops a multimedia display that looks like it was designed as part of the package and not just slapped into a template. To me, this is the best of both worlds: visual power of the original medium and accessibility based on reading device, whether it be PC or Palm or TabletPC.

The design thing

All of this discussion is about the power of publishing. We talk a great deal about the core asset of newspapers being content or connection to the communities they serve. But newspapers have another strength: the institutional knowledge and talent for publishing. We know how to communicate by design. We organize and prioritize by design.

However, are the newspaper industry and its vendors ready to move to a model that publishes visually rich content across multiple devices in a "handle-once" work flow? The answer is still uncertain. It might happen, driven by consumer demand for visually exciting content on multiple platforms; customers care little for our back-end production difficulties.

If we don't do this, competitors will. If I ran CNET.com, I might be looking at providing print publications from my rich lode of online content. Taking CNET's XML- and HTML-formatted documents and converting them to PDF for printing on paper might be much easier in the future. And so is born another group of competitors.

The interesting thing about the future and technology is that everyone has a stake in the game -- production directors, circulation executives, advertising department leaders, and, of course, editors. The road just shifted slightly, and there are warning signs ahead.



Finberg, a managing director of Finberg-Gentry, The Digital Futurist Consultancy, has worked in newsroom, information-technology, interactive-media, and corporate-strategy roles for several leading newspapers, including The Arizona Republic in Phoenix, the Chicago Tribune, and the San Francisco Chronicle.



Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher.