Survey of Newspaper Production Flow for E-paper - Kungliga ...

Johan Danckwardt
Survey of newspaper production flow for e-paper 5 Analysis
5.3.1 Production and storage
The production of the finished e-paper edition should take place on the server side at
Sundsvalls Tidning, rather than on the client using client-side transformations. It would of
course be possible to let the consumers e-paper terminal download all the content and put it
together locally, but would require more computer power on the consumer end, processor
speed and battery capacity which ads up to a terminal that not as many consumers can afford.
Further, this probably would be possible to perform it is better that Sundsvalls Tidning has
full control of the production process and because of the legal matter of the Editor in Chief
who has full responsibility of all material published in the name of Sundsvalls Tidning.
5.3.2 E-paper generator
When creating a system for generating an e-paper edition, there are several issues to solve in
order to get the system to run with as little human intervention as possible. The first issue to
solve is in what file types the e-paper edition should be presented. Even when this is decided
and agreed upon by Tidningsutgivarna and DigiNews, there are still several questions on how
it should be presented in the best way.
If Sundsvalls Tidning for instance decides on working with the idea of using different
templates, each with fixed standard sizes on images and advertisements there are some
parameters that can cause problems. When a text article is placed into a fixed, finite space it is
not certain that the space would be big enough. One way to solve the problem without
changing the amount of text would be by using some kind of automatic kerning, altering font
size, font spacing and/or line spacing. The risk with doing this is that if it is a long article the
text could get very compressed and the text would be difficult to read. My recommendation to
solve the problem with long articles is to let the text overflow be stored in hidden pages that
are hidden in the background and are not shown in the content index. On the page where the
article is placed there would then be a special icon indicating that there is more to read. When
clicking this icon the rest of the article would be shown.
In the XML code of each article, the article’s ID tag tells us the corresponding ID of the
images that relate to the articles text. Each image should have been duplicated by the IPM
workflow server to all the used image sizes. The system grabs the intended image with the
right size and places it at the intended image space in the template. The image used in the
paper edition tells us which image is the main image. The orientation of the main image,
landscape or portrait tells us what template to use. It would be possible to place an icon
belonging to the article indicating that there are more images to be seen.
Advertisements should be placed on the basis of their placement code, as dictated by the
advertisement sales staff. Each advertisement space should have its unique placement code
and thereby only one advertisement can be placed in that spot. When all the content have been
placed and it shows that there are white spots with no content, these spots should be filled
with Sundsvalls Tidnings own advertisement, for example an advertisement intended to
recruit new consumers to one of their products. These types of advertisements are often called
plugs.
The process of producing an e-paper edition should be repeated, at least one time per hour in
order to keep the content fresh with the latest news. As I see it, an hourly interval is the
minimum update frequency for the e-.paper edition, but it could be a good starting point in the
beginning of the e-paper editions life. With an hourly update Sundsvalls Tidning would have
a greater control of what external content that are being published.
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