Classic Battles: IFRA's Harald Löffler on proprietary systems

The functionality of "proprietary" layout engines is much better today than a few years ago. ... Newspapers see that proprietary layout engines are "good enough" for layout and have a better integration to the overall efficiency (workflow) as well as the integration with planning, tracking and advertising.

The amazing thing are XML editors. Look at EidosMedia. EidosMedia software is based on the usage of an XML database (Methóde) and has developed their own XML Editor (XSmile) for editing. The so called "standard" systems like InDesign and Quark XPress are not XML-Editors. Now people are calling EidosMedia software non-standard. I call that strange.

Convergence is also a point. Quark XPress and InDesign are not per se built for cross-media publishing. They are layout documents and not media-neutral. If you want to produce cross media, then you have to assure that the content is stored in a media-neutral way for other channels. This is more a question of the flexibility of the database and the storage mechanism and not so much a question of the layout engine.

Page first published: 11.03.2008