Database publishing

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

Database publishing is an area of automated media production in which specialized techniques are used to generate paginated documents from source data residing in traditional databases. Common examples are catalogues, price lists and telephone directories.

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: Datalogics Pager, Adobe FrameMaker / InDesign, QuarkXPress/QuarkXPress Server, Xyvision and Arbortext Advanced Print Publisher (formerly 3B2).

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.