In this presentation from the 2024 Pacific Virtual User Group, Guy van der Kolk, Typefi Product Manager, demonstrates Typefi’s XML web authoring integrations with Fonto Editor and SyncroSoft’s Oxygen XML Web Author.
This video is part 1 of a 3-part demo presentation—check out part 2 for a demo of the new Index Validation feature in Typefi Writer, and part 3 for a demo of Typefi Writer’s preflight checks including options to check for local formatting and missing links.
Transcript
Alright, good. Welcome back to the main room.
And the next half an hour or so, we are going to be spending looking at some real-life features that we have been working on with our teams in the past year or so, more specifically around authoring because that’s an environment that I’m responsible for within Typefi currently and that’s where I spend a lot of the time together with our teams working on.
So because we have a mixture of both existing customers as well as customers that are investigating whether Typefi is a relevant solution for them, a little bit.
So what we’re looking at is a PDF that’s been generated as part of our structured authoring. So this customer uses DITA, it’s part of our demonstration files that we use for the Adobe Experience Manager integration, as well as any other customers that work with DITA.
And what will often tend to happen obviously, is you’ve already seen some amazing examples from our partner Innodata on what you can do with Typefi. So there’s not much doubt that we’re capable of generating some very good layouts, but as always tends to happen in these cycles, pulling it back to what Caleb was demonstrating earlier, the PDF is out there and there is just one little problem with this PDF.
This is not a floodlight, clearly it is something that is supposed to be above a table and not a floodlight. So there is a last-minute change that we need to make.
And if we’re looking at XML-based workflows, what is very often the case is that if you need to make changes to your XML and you want to do it in a true single-source fashion, you have to go back to your authoring environment, make the change, re-export the XML and run it through Typefi to make that change.
But we talked about how can we make that easier for our customers.
So if we’re looking at the browser here, we’re looking at our Typefi Server interface, which is the place where if you choose, you can store your files. And if you’re using XML-based workflows and are interested in this web authoring, the files need to be on the Typefi Server. And in this case we’re working with some DITA and DITA map files.
So what I’m going to do is I’m actually going to make that change right here in the Typefi Server by selecting and clicking edit. And that is, in this case, going to open up… It’s early in the morning, it doesn’t want to do anything yet. One moment, let me try that again.
I’m going to click edit. That’s always the risk of live demos. Now it’s had its cup of coffee and it’s here.
So we’ve opened up this DITA map file in one of our partners, Syncro Soft’s Oxygen Web Authoring environment. So we could go in here and we could go ahead and make that content change right here and turn this from a floodlight into a pendant light right in the Typefi Server where you’re usually interacting with your Typefi workflows anyway.
We’ve added, this is the straight up stock Oxygen DITA support that they have with the Oxygen Web Author, but we’ve added some buttons up here that allow you to select a Typefi workflow and also publish to that workflow.
Now we’ve picked two partners. One of them is Oxygen, the other one is Fonto, so let me go ahead and switch to a different tab and do the same process, but from Fonto, that is the wrong tab. One moment.
That is the right tab. Let me try again. Sorry. There we go.
So this time it’s opened up in Fonto and what you can see is, why did we choose two?
Obviously some customers are already used to working with Oxygen, so in that case it makes perfect sense to work with Oxygen as a online with authoring environment. But as we saw earlier in Innodata’s demonstration, some customers are unfamiliar with XML and therefore prefer much more of something that is similar to Word. So that’s what Fonto offers.
So let me make the same modification here, pendant light, and then I’m actually going to double check. Yes, it’s connected. I’m actually going to publish this right here from the authoring environment. The same can be done from Oxygen.
So I’m going to run the job and in a moment it will tell us that the job is done and our fix should be available for working.
One thing that I’d also like you to notice, I’m going to go back quickly to Oxygen. And so at this moment this file is checked out so that if somebody else wanted to make a change, they wouldn’t be able to, it would be shown that it’s checked out by you for making edits.
So I’m going to go ahead and click yes and now this file is back to hand it over so that somebody else can make edits. So the job is completed. Let me go to the job view and open up our PDF and we can see that now we are indeed dealing with a pendant light instead of a mistaken floodlight.
So that’s a look at what our web authoring integrations with our partners, Syncro Soft’s Oxygen Web Author and the Fonto Editor, look like in real life.