WALNUT CREEK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--In an online conference today, Silicon Publishing demonstrated early results of work that expands the output capabilities of the company’s document design solution, Silicon Designer, from printed products to products that are received across electronic media.
Silicon Designer works in conjunction with Adobe InDesign on the desktop, along with InDesign Server or Adobe Scene7 Web-To-Print on the server, to let users create personalized communications from a single WYSIWYG drag-and-drop interface. It was originally designed to be the premier online editing application for such high-quality personalized print documents as greeting cards, photobooks, brochures, and catalogs.
In today’s call about Silicon Designer’s new capabilities, Silicon Publishing president Max Dunn said, “In the past few months, we’ve added online output options like HTML, email, iPad web applications, and personalized URLs to select implementations of the original print-oriented Silicon Designer, and they work really well."
Dunn explained that these implementations were built with Silicon Publishing’s rendition-agnostic XML, and said “We expect this model to be a powerful foundation for even more sophisticated multi-publishing solutions we’ll be rolling out in the future.”
Control of what you see and get. HTML documents “re-flow.” Print documents don’t. HTML renders differently in different browsers. Print display is static.
To ensure exact design fidelity in every format, Silicon Designer handles their differences with distinct, true-representation interfaces, and lets you preview work for different targets before you print or publish.
Dunn explained, “With email output, we make a single HTML file support the diverse range of client devices that will receive it. So it always conforms to rigorous requirements of the form of output. To generate web pages or iPad output, we leverage the more modern advantages of HTML5 to completely preserve precise graphics and layout. Our XML models for rendition and semantics are the underlying foundation.”
WYSIWYG replaces outdated systems. Silicon Designer displays information from data sources in drag-and-droppable fields for personalization and customization. Layout for communications via print, web, email, and handheld devices—optionally personalized for each unique recipient—is set up in one system, and the same content can be re-used in all the output choices. The Silicon Designer WYSISYG solution replaces disjointed workflows, learning curves, and other expensive time wasters.
Use your data source for many products. Silicon Designer lets you use the same data source for virtually all personalized communications. Data variables are managed from Silicon Designer’s single online interface for final output over multiple channels: web, print, email, and mobile devices.
“The goal of single-source multi-channel publishing has eluded a lot of organizations,” says Dunn. “We think they’ll find Silicon Designer makes it much easier to achieve a single workflow in both web and print publishing.”
Reusable templates. Templates for virtually any final output—print, web, email, and handheld devices—are set up from within Adobe InDesign, aided by a powerful Adobe InDesign CS Extension. Silicon Designer’s template-based process lets you easily repurpose your work when you want it to be quickly tailored by or for a different client, project, format, or other strategy.
Works with your current print engine. Silicon Designer supports multiple engines for back-end print production, including Adobe InDesign Server, Adobe Scene7, or XMPie. As a back-end document-creation component; it works alongside the current infrastructure, like online stores. Existing systems don’t have to be re-vamped.
Fully extensible. Silicon Designer was designed for extensibility with a services-based architecture, extensible UI components, and an XML model for rendition and variable data. Developers can extend it to accommodate unique workflows, system integration points, and varied user experiences.
Brandable. Silicon Designer can be skinned, and since it works with diverse back-ends like shopping carts, digital asset management systems, and work flows, the brand you put on your public interface can be the only one your end-users know about.
Constrain design, control use. Silicon Designer lets you completely control not just the characteristics of the document for output, but also what the front-end user will experience while editing. For fixed design set-ups, Silicon Designer lets you specify what users can and can’t edit, and it can be configured to reveal selected sets of templates, assets, colors, and font choices. So when you use Silicon Designer for personalized in-house communications, you can control artwork consistency without even trying.
More about Silicon Publishing. Silicon Publishing is a leading developer of web-to-print, web-to-web, multi-channel, and other automated publishing solutions. By blending core technologies like Adobe Scene7, InDesign Server, and XMPie with our own innovations, we enable our customers to automate and produce high-quality content for any medium. We have over a decade of experience implementing best-of-class publishing solutions for some of the world’s top brands.
More information about Silicon Designer and Silicon Publishing is available at http://siliconpublishing.com, http://siliconpublishing.com/products/silicondesigner, and http://blog.siliconpublishing.com.