Emily Johnston, Typefi Business Development Director, recently sat down for a chat with Kaplan and Componize to discuss how Typefi, along with Componize CCMS and structured authoring in DITA, has revolutionised how Kaplan produces its content.
What was once a tedious workflow—taking content manually from Microsoft Word into InDesign—is now highly automated and streamlined. Kaplan’s authors now create content in DITA, store it in Componize, and publish it automatically using Typefi.
Check out the video above for all the details about how Typefi improved Kaplan’s production process.
Thanks to Dipo Ajose-Coker at Componize for organising the webinar! And a big thank you to Mike Wolff, Digital Production Manager at Kaplan, for agreeing to participate in this great conversation.
Key Points
Kaplan’s Production Process Before Typefi
Prior to 2014, Kaplan’s publishing workflow was a manual and time-consuming process. Content was authored in Word, and then imported manually into Adobe InDesign.
Before we started using Typefi…[production] was a really lengthy process. It involved importing the Word file into InDesign and then styling all the content.
In 2014, Kaplan began using DITA for content authoring. This brought some benefits, but the process still had flaws. Conversion of DITA content to InDesign was costly, and the outputs needed extensive editing.
It was an expensive and time-consuming process because the output that we got from [the DITA to InDesign] conversions needed a lot of cleanup after the fact to make it look presentable.
Kaplan and Typefi Partnership
Typefi was able to solve Kaplan’s challenges through automated publishing with Adobe InDesign. Production is now lightning-fast and done completely in-house.
We chose Typefi as a partner because their software allows us to quickly transform our DITA content into our desired deliverables, whether it be a print product, a PDF, and on occasion, EPUBs.
The outputs created by Typefi are built using intelligent automation that takes best-practice design rules into account. They’re accurate and require minimal editing, which has saved the Kaplan production team countless hours.
[Typefi] gives us InDesign files that come out really well. It’s really impressive how close they are to ready to go once they come out of Typefi.
Integration with Componize CCMS
Kaplan’s content is now stored in Componize, a DITA CCMS that allows Kaplan to easily manage DITA content as well as other assets. Componize offers lots of flexibility in terms of content organisation and integration with Typefi.
Both Componize and Typefi offer open APIs, so connecting the two systems together is seamless. Typefi can take DITA content directly from Componize to automatically create flawless outputs.
In the current workflow, Kaplan exports content manually from Componize and uploads it to Typefi—but there are plans to take advantage of these APIs in the near future.
This content was adapted from an Insights from Experts interview hosted & created by Componize. It originally appeared on the Componize blog on 2 June 2023.