Vehicle for Outsourcing Pagination

By: Jim Rosenberg Newsengin's "pretty crude" Quark XTensions are giving way to "beautiful integration with InDesign," says President George Landau. Copy can be dragged from the GPS browser onto InDesign pages, and those pages can be moved to the GPS Web server via http protocol. If a publisher chooses, this permits designers to work outside the newsroom without a VPN or special software.

While Brown Publishing's set-up would make that the exception, that kind of capability makes possible centralized or outsourced design and pagination.

It's what attracted the Pagemasters outsourcing subsidiary of Australian Associated Press to the Roxen Editorial Portal, with which it produces an Adelaide weekly's pages. When the software was licensed, Pagemasters Managing Director Bruce Davidson said it enabled the newspaper's staff "to see their pages as they are being designed," and provides "comfort to editorial executives ? especially when production takes place at a geographically remote location."

While Shaw Newspapers CEO Thomas Shaw is unsure that offshoring pagination would prove viable for his Illinois-based group, he says Roxen's Editorial Portal would support centralizing that function.

Early this year, Pagemasters also began producing in Sydney pages for London's Daily Telegraph ? using a remote desktop application to access the Telegraph's DTI PageSpeed system. So native layout files are produced in full view of and subject to correction by Telegraph staffers. A similar arrangement for copy editing was undertaken with New Zealand titles using their Cybergraphic (now Atex) systems.