My publishing problem. Any help?
 

I have spent most of this week getting my printed catalog up to date, which has brought back a recurring nightmare for me.
You see, I run a printed catalogue for retail, with prices, a reseller catalogue that is generic without pricing for my resellers, and a web site with buy now buttons for retail, as well as a generic hidden site for resellers.
For years I have been trying to figure a solution that will allow me to do the work once, and publish it to all the different outputs. Even just keeping price changes up to date across all these items is a major effort. I thought I had a solution with Ventura, hooking into a database, alas it is not that simple.
A graphic optimised for the web looks lousy when printed. A print run without prices will have different pagination to one with prices. And yes, a catalog with prices on the page sells better than one with a seperate price list, I've tested.
So, any ideas out there?

Re: My publishing problem. Any help?
 

I don't have a simple solution (if anyone else does, I'm all ears!), but here's one that will work.

First, use Adobe FrameMaker to store your information. FrameMaker has a feature that lets you store different versions of a document in the same file by marking the differing sections with "conditional text" as they call it. You just highlight a section and then designate it as "retail" or "reseller." Information that is common to both versions, you leave alone. Then, when you go to print, you just specify which "condition" (or version) you want to have printed.

For the web, use a program called WebWorks Publisher to convert your FrameMaker document to HTML. Unfortunately, this step is a little complicated, but someone who knows what they are doing could set it up for you such that you can push a button and the FrameMaker document becomes a web site (and a nice looking one, I might add).

Problems with this solution:
1. FrameMaker is around $800 new.
2. WebWorks Publisher is around $850 (as an upgrade from the limited version that comes with FrameMaker).
3. You'll want to hire someone knowledgable to set you up.

This combination is what my company uses to produce the manuals for our in-house software. It works very well once you have it in place. Plus, FrameMaker is designed for documents where there's a lot of repetition in the formatting, such as a catalog.

(As an aside, when the documentation group switched from MS Word to FrameMaker, productivity just about doubled because they no longer had to spend so much time keeping their documents stable.)

In the future, XML will probably be the way to go. Right now, however, I find the tools for working with XML are too complicated (and, not to be prideful but that's saying a lot if I think it's too complicated).

The other alternative is to cut and paste.
If anyone has better ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Hope that's helpful.
-Phil

> I have spent most of this week getting my
> printed catalog up to date, which has
> brought back a recurring nightmare for me.
> You see, I run a printed catalogue for
> retail, with prices, a reseller catalogue
> that is generic without pricing for my
> resellers, and a web site with buy now
> buttons for retail, as well as a generic
> hidden site for resellers.
> For years I have been trying to figure a
> solution that will allow me to do the work
> once, and publish it to all the different
> outputs. Even just keeping price changes up
> to date across all these items is a major
> effort. I thought I had a solution with
> Ventura, hooking into a database, alas it is
> not that simple.
> A graphic optimised for the web looks lousy
> when printed. A print run without prices
> will have different pagination to one with
> prices. And yes, a catalog with prices on
> the page sells better than one with a
> seperate price list, I've tested.
> So, any ideas out there?