Distribution (via Print, PDF, and the Web)

What do I mean when I say distribution? The sharing or delivery of content to its intended recipient requires that you know how to best deliver that content. For example, would you send an email to someone who doesn't have a computer? Careful consideration and planning needs to take place by studying the demographics you are trying to market to, which will help you decide how to best reach themvia print, disk, or the Web. Be sure to ask these questions:

• Who is your audience?

• How will your content, message, brand, product, and service be distributed?

• How quickly does this information need to reach them?

• Which distribution method has proven most effective in the past?

• Which distribution method has proven least effective?

Print

All the answers to these questions should drive you toward a distribution solution for your publication. We have been living in a print-centric world for quite some time nowsince Gutenberg. So, the first questions to be answered are Will this be a printed piece? Do I need ink on paper to convey this messageis that what my customer expects or wants? How important is color, clarity, and resolution to the message I'm trying to convey?

Despite the popularity of the Internet and email, print is still a viable distribution method. People still love to curl up with a good book (or magazine or catalog), but can you really curl up with a good computer? Can any other medium convey images of clothing, food, or jewelry as well as print? The answer of course, is "no," and this is why, despite the onslaught of web and email communications, print is still a viable method of distributing content. Printed material is portable and doesn't require the recipient to own a computer or have an Internet connection. Everyone has a mailing address but not necessarily an email address. Remember the demographics you are marketing to.

It's just that now print is not the only method, it's not the quickest method (particularly when you factor in mail or some other delivery option), and it's not the least expensive method (particularly when you include postage rates).

But 9 times out of 10, when you sit down to plan content distribution, the first question you are still likely to ask is, "Is this going to be printed?"

PDF

Perhaps content publishing will take place in more than one form. Will you print your company newsletter and make it available on your website? Is it easier to email the content than to physically mail it? For either choice, do you have the necessary data to support either function, and is it accurate? Or perhaps you'll direct everyone to a URL somewhere on your website where they will be instructed to download a document (keeping the overhead of an email message to a minimum).

Portable Document Format (PDF) is an excellent choice for easily repurposing content into a digital form that is readable by the masses. The PDF file format has become a document exchange standard and is an excellent choice for supplementing a printed piece with a digital one. But, can you make a bad PDF? Well, sure you can. You must consider how you will make a PDF; what version of the PDF software you'll use; and the color model, resolution, and file size you'll use. You also must determine who will make this PDF to ensure that everyone can open and read it.

The distribution method you choose might be a passive method, instead of active. You won't push content to specific people or addresses, but drive people to a location. What it this location? Is it a website? Rather than pushing many pieces of information to many locations, with the inherent risks of the pieces not reaching their destinations, the destinations being incorrect, and the process being quite costly, you can drive everyone to the same destination, thereby ensuring that the same content is delivered each time. It also enables you to change the content frequently and cost effectively.

When we talk about publishing content via the Web, we have moved from a twodimensional, subtractive color model and a manufacturing process known as print to a viewing-only, additive color model and development-based service known as web. Will you design differently for web than for print? Are the resources that are required for print different from those required for web? The answer is "yes and no." PDF is the bridge between the two media because it can be repurposed for both distribution methods. Web pages are not well suited to be printed, and print files are not well suited to be posted as web pages.

Web

One of your choices for moving your content to the Web might include Adobe's GoLive, which creates standards-based websites. You can create web pages in GoLive and work with Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe PDF files directly within GoLive. InDesign's Package for GoLive offers you the ability to repurpose your layout and graphics into file formats, colors, and resolutions appropriate for web instead of print.

Does this mean you have to design once, twice, or three times to distribute your content in three different ways?

Many of us have been doing this for a while now. But this isn't an efficient use of time and resources. Especially because our goal should always be to deliver the same, consistent content regardless of the distribution method. This is where XML comes in.

If you are going to be tasked with the repurposing of content to a variety of best-fit distribution methods for marketing, what are you going to do? How are you going to accomplish this efficiently? The answer might be XML, depending on your resources and handoffs. What is XML, and how can it be used to repurpose content? XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. It can be used to store any kind of structured document and can include information so that it can pass between different computing systems that might not be able to talk to each other. It describes the meaning of information, not how it's displayed. And separating content from presentation is the key to XML's importance.

You might already have experience tagging text with style sheets. Think of style sheets as a tagging mechanism. XML tags, while concerned only with the content of information (and not its presentation), can be used as a method of targeting incoming content in InDesign. Mapping XML tags to paragraph and character styles in InDesign can facilitate automated workflows. And the same tagged XML can be used in GoLive with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to allow flexible repurposing of content, changing the presentation of content quickly by modifying the externally referenced CSS file.

Note

Although the subject of XML is outside the scope of this book, if you're interested in a primer on the subject, pick up XML for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide by Elizabeth Castro (PeachPit Press, ISBN: 0201710986).

To recap, what is the message, who will we send it to, and how will we get it there?