Database publishing

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the company formerly known as Database Publications, see Europress.

Database Publishing is a term used in the area of automated media production to indicate techniques to automatically make up publications starting from data residing in traditional databases. Common examples are the making up of pricelists and catalogues.

The basic idea is using database contents like article and price information to fill out empty template documents. This allows for quick generations of final output and, in case of changes, quickly perform updates, with limited or no manual intervention.

The main layout applications for this workflow are: Adobe FrameMaker / InDesign, QuarkXPress, Xyvision and the highly flexible 3B2 (APP). These applications make their broad spectrum of features available for extension and integration with vertical solutions, that can be developed either internally, through some form of scripting (e.g. JavaScript or AppleScript for InDesign), or externally, through some API and corresponding Developer Kits.

Other variants of Database Publishing are the rendering of content for direct PDF-output. This approach prevents manual intervention on the final output, since PDF is not (comfortably) editable. This may not be perceived as a limitation in situations like report generation where manual editability is not needed or not desired.