Gadgetopia

Documentum Publishing Suite: Documentum has announced integration with a bunch of print publishing applicatons.

“Documentum Enterprise Publishing Solution is a bundling of existing components from the 5.2 iteration being re-released with an integration component, called Authoring Integration Services. The 5.3 platform pulls together ‘hundreds’ of authoring tools like Word, Quark or PhotoShop.”

One of the hardest things I’ve found with content re-use is getting the same content to look right in both Web and print formats. I’m done some work with Microsoft Publisher VBA and XML-FO, but print publications have even more contraints on them than Web pages — content doesn’t flow, whitespace is more glaring, and when an 8.5” x 11” page ends…it ends.

Additionally, readers are less forgiving of print. With a Web page, users have a subconcious knowledge that the browser window is fluid, and their settings may have an effect on the content, so they’re willing to shrug off a lot of glitches. Not so with print. If text flies off the edge of a piece of paper, you end up looking really bad.

Content re-use from Web to print is tough. Here’s to hoping Documentum can pull it off, because I know a lot of enterprise customers could use it.