Case Studies

Vision Bio Systems (Melbourne)

Technology and Design: Reference/XML/FrameMaker

Vision BioSystems produce their catalogue annually with a print run of 260,000. The catalog is a high-quality colour publication providing images and technical details relating to instrumentation and several hundred reagents. The catalog also contains specialised indexes for Product Names and Product Codes. These indexes are a key feature of the catalogue.

Prior to the 2006 catalogue, the Vision BioSystems catalogue had been edited and published as a structured FrameMaker application, with proprietary FrameMaker plug-ins used to generate the indexes. The existing application was very complex and Vision BioSystems were heavily dependent on specialised experts to manage changes to styles and page layouts. The Index generation process relied heavily on manual editing over a period of several months, as a result the catalog was being produced with inaccurate indices with many missing entries.

eGloo developed a new FrameMaker application, which delivered the following benefits:

• Guaranteed the accuracy, consistency and completeness of the indexes by
  automating the index generation process.
• Reduced the time required to generate the Indexes from several months to less than
  half an hour. This also enabled Vision BioSystems to regenerate the index as and
  when required to reflect the addition or removal of products from the body of the
  catalogue, and to use the indexes as a tool for cross-checking the contents of the
  catalogue.
• Enabled the Index to be updated dynamically to reflect pagination changes in the body
  of the catalogue.
• Created much simplified style templates and master pages to enable Vision BioSystems
  to quickly and easily manage and amend their own styles and page layouts.

The new FrameMaker application uses an XML DTD. For the purposes of Index generation, data is exported from FrameMaker to XML and the information required in the indexes is extracted from the XML files and re-imported back into FrameMaker, again via XML. The data extraction process uses Perl scripts, which was Vision BioSystems' preferred programming language, though any of a number of programming languages could do the job equally as well.

Knowledge transfer also consisted of conducting courses on FrameMaker and the basics of XML in Australia and the United Kingdom.