XML Professional Publisher (XPP) is an automated

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

based publishing system that was developed out of a proprietary typesetting system. XPP is a standards-based, content formatting and publishing application for the automatic composition, transformation, and rendering of

SGML The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML; International Organization for Standardization, ISO 8879:1986) is a standard for defining generalized markup languages for documents. ISO 8879 Annex A.1 states that generalized markup is "based on t ...

or tagged

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

content into high-quality output into

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language and dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is most commonly used in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a Turing complete programming language, it c ...

and

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

format. It holds the XML or SGML in its native format and it is able to re-export the data after paper pagination, even if corrections have been made in XPP. The software is used worldwide to produce a wide variety of publications including Technical Documentation, Scientific, Medical Journals (STM) Directory, Dictionary and Legal loose-leaf publishing. XPP was originally, in the early 1980s, a proprietary system which included the software and hardware. It was one of the first systems to combine high speed batch composition with an interactive mode displaying

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for what you see is what you get, refers to software that allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed document, web ...

pages. Originally Xyvision was built using its own display hardware as off-the-shelf hardware at that time was not up to the task of rapidly displaying pages. Over the years as readily available hardware became more powerful, Xyvision moved away from its own hardware to become a software-only vendor. Xyvision was a publicly held company and evolved in 1995 into the privately owned company called XyEnterprise. XyEnterprise currently employs some 80 people to develop and maintain the XPP software as well as supporting its other products, Contenta, an intelligent

content management system and LiveContent, an information products delivery platform. XyEnterprise was subsequently bought by SDL and in turn SDL merged with RWS. XPP can be used as a stand-alone system or in conjunction with Contenta and LiveContent. Each page within XPP is stored as a separate file, which allows XPP to open up a document at every page and reformat this page as a separate unit. XPP can even compose a single line as a separate unit. The ability to handle pages as individual objects means that it is well suited to loose-leaf publications. The software also has a very active

User group A users' group (also user's group or user group) is a type of Club (organization), club focused on the use of a particular technology, usually (but not always) computer-related. Overview Users' groups started in the early days of Mainframe compu ...

which helps communicate back to RWS what the users want to see in the future, and is usually incorporated into successive new versions. Version 9.4 increases the use of CSS to do page layouts as well as the typographic styling introduced at 9.0.

References

External links

RWS XPP

Letterpart Ltd
* {{webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161106151727/https://www.xml.com/pub/p/208/, date=November 6, 2016, title=XML Professional Publisher at XML.com
XyUser Group
Typesetting software