About ePublisher Express

ePublisher Express is part of WebWorks’ ePublisher solution. It provides a way for writers to create content within a single authoring environment and quickly produce online output. With ePublisher Express, writers bypass the hassle of spending time and resources learning how to design for each and every published output; instead, writers can instantly benefit from the power and capabilities of ePublisher Pro along with the design work of others who create what’s called an ePublisher Stationery. ePublisher Express is the core component of the ePublisher solution and is the most effective way to produce publications from a pre-existing Stationery. In addition, ePublisher Express provides automatic synchronization with your existing Stationery, allowing you to update your existing projects without doing any manual imports or design efforts.

If you are looking to change the design of your Stationery or create Stationery for use with other projects, then you will also need to obtain ePublisher Pro. However, most day to day publication efforts, including the preview of content and conformance reports, can be most effectively done with ePublisher Express, and very little training is required in order for you to begin creating your own publications for one or more output formats.

ePublisher Express provides a fast and easy way to create online publications. It serves two main purposes: (1) to generate complete, ready-to-deploy publications, and (2) act as a proofing/preview tool to ensure that your source content will look good when it is finally published.

To generate output, ePublisher Express takes the information defined in the Stationery file and uses it to convert your source documents and/or files into your desired publication format. The overall appearance of your output depends on the style and formatting information defined within the Stationery file.

To ensure that your source content looks good and conforms to your own established standards, ePublisher Express allows you to publish parts of your documentation in whole or piece meal while you are authoring the content, thus allowing you to intercept ahead of time issues with style and format that may degrade the end result of your publications. Not only is it easy to “point-n-click” publish, you can also generate reports for easy detection and correction of invalid style usage, missing links, web accessibility compliance, and available topic identifier names.

What Are the Benefits of Using ePublisher Express?

ePublisher Express lets you concentrate on producing high-quality content within a single authoring environment and spend less time on designing, implementing, and delivering online output. As a writer, you can now simply create your content using the template provided by your stationery designer and quickly generate output using the stationery file in ePublisher Express.

ePublisher Express improves the documentation process by implementing template and stationery usage, which ensures that your output conforms to the standards established by the Stationery designer. To ensure that your source documents adhere to the style and formatting rules defined within the Stationery file, you can generate conformance reports in ePublisher Express. The conformance reports inform and direct you to where specific problems occur in your source documents.

Some other benefits of ePublisher Express include:

How Does ePublisher Express Work?

The first step in producing any type of output is creating an ePublisher Express project from a previously existing ePublisher Stationery file that was created using ePublisher Pro. Then you simply add any source files you desire to the project and you will have created a publication that adheres to the styling and configuration of the Stationery.

Within your source documents, you should have applied styles your content. The style names are important because ePublisher Express uses them to determine which styles from the Stationery to apply to your output. If you are authoring DITA content, then your styling is controlled using pre-defined but configurable settings in the Stationery.

In order to determine what style information to use, ePublisher Express looks to the Stationery file, which contains a list of all the style names and their style definitions. The style definitions include information like font styles, text size, border styles, and margins. ePublisher Express matches the style name from the source document to the style name in the Stationery file. If the style names match, ePublisher Express retrieves the formatting information from the Stationery and applies it to the content.

For example, if you are using Heading 1s in your source document, and Heading 1 is defined in your stationery with the following style attributes:

Font-family: Times New Roman

Font-size: 12pt

Font-weight: Bold

Text-color: Blue

then any content that uses a Heading1 style will inherit this style information.

The ePublisher Express Workflow

The basic ePublisher Express workflow involves the following steps:

In the future, your publications will continue to look good, even when you have long moved on to another project or your style and output requirements have changed.

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