Introduction to Typefi Standards Cloud

Are you struggling to create consistent, professional-looking ISO adoptions that your customers are happy to pay for?

Standards Cloud is the fastest and easiest way to produce high-quality standard adoptions using the same technology and source XML that ISO uses—no technical or typesetting expertise needed.

With the click of a button, Standards Cloud wraps ISO content with your organisation’s customised front and back matter to create a seamless national standard ready for distribution in under an hour!

If you’re an ISO member organisation, creating your first 50 ISO adoptions with Standards Cloud is completely free of charge.

This webinar, recorded on 8 April 2020, introduces Typefi Standards Cloud, demonstrates a range of features, and shows you how you can create a national ISO adoption in three easy steps.

If you’d like to have a chat about how Standards Cloud can help you, please get in touch.

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00:00	Introduction
00:19	About Typefi
01:48	About Typefi Standards Cloud Why would you want to use Standards Cloud? Other Typefi products for standards publishers Future Standards Cloud development Acknowledgement of ISO
04:00	Demo: Adobe InDesign templates used in Standards Cloud
07:30	Demo: Standards Cloud administrator features
11:53	Demo: How to adopt an ISO standard in Standards Cloud
19:08	Q&A

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Transcript

CHANDI: My name is Chandi Perera, CEO of Typefi, and joining me in this presentation is Dilum Samarajeewa and Damian Gibbs, who will also be presenting later.

In the next few minutes I will introduce you to Typefi, and then we will continue on in the demos.

About Typefi

Typefi was founded in 2001. We are headquartered in Queensland, Australia, but we have offices in the US, UK, Netherlands, and Sri Lanka.

We have customers in about 35 countries, and have more than 10,000 users worldwide.

What we do, is we take your content and we help publish it into multiple formats, be it print, online, or mobile.

We work with a lot of standards bodies around the world. We started working with ISO more than a decade ago, and today we work with a lot of national standards bodies and standards development organisations.

Some of them are listed here, but we have a much wider customer base ranging from your traditional publishers like Lonely Planet or Random House, to companies like Apple or Makita, or other manufacturers.

The Typefi publishing platform

Typefi is a single-source automated publishing platform. What we do is we take content in many formats, be it XML, Microsoft Office, Google Docs, or many many other formats, publish it through Adobe InDesign to create PDF or EPUB, or directly generate HTML, DAISY, and more than 30 different formats in a few minutes.

We leverage industry standards. There is no Typefi file format. We use XML as our underlying file format, but what we do is take file formats from proprietary or industry standards and publish them into other industry standard formats.

Typefi Standards Cloud

Typefi Standards Cloud is for adopting ISO standards for national adoptions. It’s available for all ISO members and it automatically combines ISO source XML with your national metadata.

The setup, configuration, and the first 50 adoptions processed through Typefi Standards Cloud is completely free of charge. After that, it’ll cost you 10 US dollars per adoption.

Why would you want to use Standards Cloud?

Benefits include consistent page numbering, which you won’t get if you’re merging PDF files together. Hyperlinks, tables of contents, live-linking across cross-references, citations, all of that without manually having to adjust any files.

It is a lot simpler than merging PDF files with your front covers, or working with Word documents from ISO and adding your own front covers to that.

We fully support Unicode, and you can localise the user interface to your own language.

Typefi supports multiple front covers and multiple front and back sections for national adoptions, and we will show this to you a little bit in the demonstration.

Other Typefi products for standards publishers

There are many many features that’s offered out of the box on Standards Cloud, but if Standards Cloud’s not the right product, we have other products for you. From Typefi Desktop, which is a single-user desktop version, or Typefi Workgroup and a Cloud version.

This table outlines what we have, and it is also available on our website.

Future Standards Cloud development

Future versions of Typefi Standards Cloud will continue to improve on our existing product platform.

We will support adoptions from other organisations, other than ISO, we will support authoring and producing of national standards on the same platform, we will support creation of WCAG-compliant HTML and DAISY for accessibility, and much more, based on your feedback.

This is a product under continuous development, and we will develop it based on your feedback.

Acknowledgement of ISO

Also at this point I want to acknowledge that this product actually contains intellectual property from ISO specifically produced for ISO members. We want to acknowledge ISO’s participation in helping us create that when we did the initial implementation at ISO.

Demo: Adobe InDesign templates used in Standards Cloud (04:00)

Continuing on to your first demonstration, I want to show you what is sitting behind Typefi, doing all of the pagination.

We are using a product called Adobe InDesign. Adobe InDesign is the world’s most-used professional publishing tool. According to Adobe, Adobe InDesign is used in over 90% of professional publications in the world.

So, the XML that’s produced from Typefi will be produced using Adobe InDesign into PDF pages, and Damian’s going to give us a quick demonstration of how this works in the background.

DAMIAN: Thanks, Chandi.

When you start exploring content automation, you’ll hear or have heard of the term ‘template’. This is a file which holds all the styling information to be applied to the raw content.

The type of template file can differ, depending on the type of content being processed.

On screen, I have an InDesign template that’s used in the Typefi workflow. At Typefi, InDesign is used for creating templates for PDF output as it is an industry standard for high-quality designs and outstanding typography, well supported by Adobe, and there is a large and active community of InDesign users.

Typefi enhances InDesign for automation with a plug-in called Typefi Designer. This is a suite of tools which enables designers and layout artists to create InDesign templates for Typefi automation in a familiar environment.

This allows publishers to quickly and easily upgrade existing InDesign documents to Typefi InDesign templates, without requiring designers to learn new tools or complex coding, and to scale quickly.

For each customer we start here, with an ISO template, and based on your requirements we add a front cover, which could look something like this.

We add a back page which is customised to your requirements, and possibly, if required, some front matter sections, which are designed in the template as well.

Here we have a template page for the cover of the Standards Cloud demo. Dynamic content is placed in position, and some Typefi Designer features have been applied, either as expanding frames, or fields, or both.

For example, the title of the standard will be varying lengths, so this blue frame will expand to accommodate the variable length of the content to be inserted.

Typefi Designer makes use of InDesign styles as a library. Page size, page margins, which InDesign designers set up when creating any publication in InDesign, are used along with Typefi Designer features to paginate and format the raw content.

It is important to note that InDesign users who don’t have the Typefi Designer plug-in installed are still able to open the InDesign file and work with the file.

Finally, here is the output InDesign file, which was created using the template. The custom cover page has been updated with the content from the input XML, and the rest of the document is automatically generated using intelligence built into the InDesign template with the Typefi Designer plug-in.

Finally, the InDesign file is exported to create the accessible PDF and print PDF standards on Standards Cloud, which you will see shortly.

Demo: Standards Cloud administrator features (07:30)

CHANDI: Thank you, Damian. At this point I’m going to hand over to Dilum, who is going to take you through the administrative functions and setup functions of Typefi Standards Cloud.

DILUM: Hello, everyone. My name is Dilum Samarajeewa and I am the team lead of the support team in Sri Lanka.

We will be demonstrating how easy it is to produce an ISO standard adoption with your own cover, front matter, and back matter in a few easy steps.

You can log in to Standards Cloud as an administrator or a regular user. First, we will log in as an administrator and see what are the options that are available.

So, when you log in as an administrator, you will notice that there are four buttons at the top blue bar.

First one is the Adoptions, where you can create, delete, and publish an adoption. We will be seeing in detail how to add, delete and publish an adoption in a few minutes.

Second one is the Metadata. The admin is able to set the custom default attribute for the metadata. The dropdown on the right of each field allows you to control use of the metadata.

The fields that are highlighted in yellow are autofill. That means it will straightaway take the content from the XML input file.

When a field is locked, you will notice that to the right side, a lock icon inside the field. So, that means that the user cannot edit this field, this is locked.

All the other white-coloured fields are manually controlled, which means you will need to manually add the metadata.

The organisation users will only have access to update the metadata as set by the admin in this area. This allows people to control all the various metadata items.

The admin is also able to create custom metadata. Once a custom metadata is created, an email notification will be sent to me or Damian to add that custom metadata field to the template. Once the changes are being made, don’t forget to save.

The third one is the Users, that allows the admin to add or delete users.

You can add a user by clicking on the user button on top right corner. You can delete a user by clicking on this trash icon next to a data tile.

The fourth one is the Settings, which include a number of options for the admin.

First you will notice that there are a number of information, such as the name, acronym, how many adoptions are completed and in progress, and the adoption quota.

You can also upload a logo of the organisation. You can upload the template and the PDF preset, and it also allows you to download the items, which works as a file-sharing feature.

You can also localise the appearance, as you wish.

Finally, the template sections allows you to reorder the sections which appear in the front matter. The admin is not allowed to create or delete sections. If a new section to be created, you will need to contact me or Damian, as it requires template update, as well as transform update.

Once the changes have been made, don’t forget to save.

Demo: How to adopt an ISO standard in Standards Cloud (11:53)

CHANDI: Now to Damian, who is going to take you through a user’s experience of Typefi Standards Cloud. Over to you, Damian.

DAMIAN: Thanks Chandi, thanks Dilum. I’ll be taking you through how a user will log in and create an adoption in three simple steps.

Before we start with creating an adoption on Standards Cloud, the source files should be zipped into a single file or package.

As you can see here, I’ve got my XML file and the graphics contained within a folder. And I’ve already pre-zipped the folder, and you can see that the original folder was 8MB, and this folder is 3.4MB.

This allows the user to upload content more quickly to Standards Cloud.

All right, I’ve logged in as a user. And you can see that now only the Adoptions interface, or the Adoptions tab, is visible at the top of the screen.

On the top right is the New adoption button, which will start the new adoption process.

So the first step is we will click the New adoption button, and choose the ZIP file that I created over there.

Once the adoption has been uploaded to Standards Cloud, Standards Cloud will pull the standard’s name and description from the ISO metadata from within the package. And you can see that it’s been filled in on the screen.

The next is to click on the Create button, and the adoption will be created in Standards Cloud and show as one of the items in the Adoptions list, as you can see here.

When I click on the adoption name, we’ll see five tabs at the top of the screen, the ISO, Metadata, Preface, Foreword, and Outputs.

The ISO metadata is pulled from the ISO package, and is not editable.

The second step is to update the metadata for the adoption, for which we’ll go to the first Metadata tab at the top.

The metadata is pre-filled and available depending on how the admin user set up the metadata fields. Any changes to the metadata here does not affect the ISO metadata.

So, for example, if I change the publication date to, let’s say, 2020, and I save it, going back to the ISO table you’ll see that the publication date is still the same.

Once the user has updated and changed and configured the metadata for their adoption, they can move onto the Preface tab.

Here, I’ll fill in some dummy text so you can see what the output would look like in this sample demo. We can see that the interface has some basic editing functions such as the bold and italic, and we can have bulleted or numbered lists, including a link facility.

Lets just add some data in the Foreword preface, make a heading, and we’ll just make this all italic and a bulleted list.

And we can click Save.

Finally, the third step is to publish the adoption. If we go to the Outputs tab, you can see that it is blank. That’s because we haven’t published anything yet. Let’s go ahead and click the Publish tab.

The modal confirms the status of the publication and the details, and we’ll go ahead and click Publish.

Standards Cloud will now process the content and, once complete, the Output tab will be refreshed and display the output files.

The time to produce the outputs depends largely on the length, complexity, and number of images in the ISO standard. Also, if multiple users are publishing at the same time, jobs will be queued and should take a little bit longer.

All right, so we’re just going to pause for a second while the job completes.

The job is complete, and Standards Cloud has refreshed the page with links to the PDFs and XML files used to create the front matter. Simply by clicking on the icons, it will automatically download the file to the user’s local machine.

Here we can see the completed ISO standard with the bookmarks on the left-hand side, the front cover, the foreword section, the preface section, which precedes the ISO standard. And here is the ISO adoption, along with all the content wrapped within the back cover.

Once an adoption has been published for this first time, you’ll see that a blue icon appears on the left-hand side of the adoption. Clicking this will immediately download the latest PDF output.

However, after the adoption has been published, it can be edited and republished. Each time an adoption is published, it is stamped with the user’s name and time.

I’m going to make some minor changes, just so we can see. And save, and republish.

We can see in the Outputs tab that the current job is in progress, but the preceding job is still available for download. You can see that it has been time-stamped with the time and the user, so there’s a constant record of previously published adoptions.

While an adoption is being published and in progress, the user is free to move around Standards Cloud and carry on editing or working on other projects.

If you change the status of an adoption from In progress to Complete, and Save, and you return to the Adoptions, you’ll see that under the In progress tab, the adoption has moved. However, it is still available under the All tab.

You can change the status at any stage, and it will appear back, either under All or In progress.

Online help is available via the Help menu button on the bottom right-hand side of the screen. There is an online help including frequently asked questions, and a detailed step-by-step on how to create an adoption.

And, if you have anything specific you would like to know, please get in touch.

So, in three easy steps we can see that standards bodies can easily publish ISO adoptions with their own metadata, cover, front matter, and back cover, without any software installations.

Q&A (19:08)

CHANDI: Thank you, Damian. We are going to pause the demonstrations now and see if anybody has got any questions, so feel free to ask the questions.

When are you planning to support any standards development organisations other than ISO?

When we have demand from people who are using it. At the moment, ISO and ISO adoptions are the only ones that are being used.

We have had some requests for IEC adoptions and we are looking at that.

But as you’re using Typefi Cloud, if there are any other SDOs and they can provide XML for this, then we can definitely do this.

Just a note that this only works with STS XML, so that could be either NISO STS or ISO STS.

Are you using XSL-FO?

No, we are not using XSL-FO, we are using Adobe InDesign on the back end. And the reason we’re doing that is even though InDesign is a commercial product, it is much much much easier to create a template in InDesign.

There is literally hundreds of thousands of InDesign professionals in the world who can create and manage templates, which is not the case with FO. Generally, there’s a very specialist number of people who can work with FO.

Does Standards Cloud include a classification tool, or can it be integrated?

So, Standards Cloud, out of the box, cannot be integrated with anything. We are not making an API available because it is a free product or a very low cost product.

But the standard Typefi products definitely make a very full-featured API available. If you want to get in touch with us right after the webinar, I can actually point you at our website, where we have the API so it can be integrated, or you can just go into our website and look for the Typefi API.

Can we have a trial version of Standards Cloud?

Yes, you can have a trial version of the program, actually the first 50 standard adoptions are free.

How is the adoption quota measured?

The quota is the first 50 adoptions after testing has completed. So after we implement your template you will test it, and after you accept it, the first 50 standard adoptions will be free.

So even if you go back to the same standard and adopt it three times, we will only count it once, but that’s 50 unique standards that you can use before you need to pay for anything. And after that it’ll be 10 dollars US per adoption.

Can adoptions be created that include national differences in the standard content?

At this point we’re not allowing you to actually edit the actual standard itself, the ISO standard itself. I know this is done by a number of our other customers like BSI.

In the future we are adding features to actually edit the STS XML directly in the system, and when we do that you should be able to edit the standards directly online. But until that’s on board, we don’t offer a facility for you to edit the XML.

If you do want to do that or edit the standard, you have to edit the XML, which is a bit icky, but that’s the best we can do right now.

Can you localise the interface?

So yes, you did see three localisations there, English, French and Spanish, those are the ones we’ve done out of the box to test the system and make sure it’s applicable more widely.

But we do offer other localisations. We can actually give you a file so you can create your own localisation as well, so if you do want to start using Standards Cloud and have a localised version of it, contact us, we’ll get you onboarded, and we’ll give you the file to localise. And then you can have all of the language in the user interface in your local language.

All right, if you do have any other questions, please contact us, our contact details are in the invitation your received for the webinar, and also there’ll be a follow-up email that has all our contact details on there.

Thank you very much for taking the time to attend our webinar, and hope to hear from you soon. Thank you again, bye bye.

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