PRELIMINARY

Overview

An Introit publishing tool will enable design engineers, product marketing managers, and technical writers to enter information about a component as it is designed, without concern for language, format, or tagging operations. The end result of the tagging process will be uniform, ECIX/SI2-compliant XML output, regardless of the word processing environment. See Figure 1 for details.

Figure 1. Introit’s Publishing System.

Publishing Tool Building Blocks

The table editor will consist of an easy-to-use OLE-based form that is pulled up from inside authoring applications, and automatic XML “tagging” of each piece of data occurs behind the scenes as the information is entered. The range of possible choices will be offered through pull-down menus with application-specific content. Users will have direct access to configuration tools through pull-down menus to customize the menu system and format the resulting datasheet.

This publishing system includes a Document Admin tool that consists of the following utilities:

• Symbol editor—Allows editing of symbols; will provide a mixture of graphical and textual capabilities that will support the entire Greek alphabet, extended ASCII, and other graphical symbols.
• Table tag viewer—A panel on the left-hand side of the screen that allows a user to view the placement and sequence of tags inside a table.
• Table tag editor—Allows a user to directly modify the tags that have been used to mark up table content.
• Table content editor—Allows a user to view the contents of a database in its native format.
• Style sheet editor—Controls the published appearance of the information, whether it be printed or Web-based delivery.

The output from this publishing tool can be a printed datasheet, CD-ROM, or Web page. An XML database back end will manage the tagged information, with a Web interface for transporting electronic content out to the end user community. The product will support local relational database access to Introit’s XML database.

The product includes a System Admin tool which will allow a system administrator to add preferred customer lists along with filters where any restrictions on what a particular customer may receive are specified. This System Admin tool also includes a Scheduler to support “push” technology, so that tasks such as news retrieval or information downloads can be scheduled for specific times. The System Admin tool is responsible for managing security functions such as usernames and passwords. Finally, the System Admin tool includes a report generator for finding out about numbers of database accesses, times of these accesses, etc.