Innovation News: True Collaboration

Written by Justin Monsees on Sat 05/03/2008 at 8:12 am

At the Innovation Festival at RIT, the School of Print Media’s Open Publishing Lab has have decided to raise the bar for publishing on-demand. The project, led by Professors Riordan and Bernius, is to have newspapers published approximately every hour, starting from the time of content upload to distribution. To publish this newspaper the technology involved uses content management software, web-based software, and automation scripting for Adobe InDesign.

To begin the process, it all starts with photos and articles. Robert Whitney, John Karahalis, and Mark Newell have been the main innovators with Drupal to handle this process. Photographers from the SPAS Photojournalism program and writers from several majors will have reporting assignments all over campus. Using a web-based portal, text can be uploaded to a content management system known as Drupal. Photos are uploaded through Xinet and processed by Dalim TWiST, which Michael Ricciardi was able to set up. From here the content is managed by Drupal and editors will have a chance to modify articles as needed and assign the proper images from a database to that text.

Once the content is uploaded, the magic begins. With the help of Drupal, Xinet, and Dalim TWiST, images and text are prepared to output to the web and to an XML file that will be used for the print edition. Using the XML file, a glorified text file with added information, an automated script written in JavaScript (by yours truly), for InDesign is used. The script is able to read the XML file to insert the text into textboxes with predefined formatting. Using the textboxes, an empty newspaper template, and photos associated with the stories the pressures on Micah Stupak for final page layout. Finally, a PDF is sent off to five devices on campus for print production.

This project proves the power of collaboration among students at RIT and marks the beginning of the next wave of projects in the SPM. Kudos to all those who put in a tremendous effort and long hours to make this happen!