Printing from Arbortext

[rschoen]

We are running Arbortext v6.1 M010. We currently don't have either the Publishing Engine or the full version of Styler. To make a manuscript print out (very lightly formatted; suitable for proofreading), we are currently using a third party, Unix-based typesetting system. We would like to move our printing to Windows since we are now using the Windows version of Arbortext. I was wondering is anyone printing or creating a PS or PDF file from Arbortext and not using the Publishing Engine? Is this even possible? Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated.

Regards,
Rick

[lfraley]

You can still get Print Composer, if you just want simple PDF output.

On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 1:40 PM, Richard Schoen <->
wrote:

> We are running Arbortext v6.1 M010. We currently don’t have either the
> Publishing Engine or the full version of Styler. To make a manuscript print
> out (very lightly formatted; suitable for proofreading), we are currently
> using a third party, Unix-based typesetting system. We would like to move
> our printing to Windows since we are now using the Windows version of
> Arbortext. I was wondering is anyone printing or creating a PS or PDF file
> from Arbortext and not using the Publishing Engine? Is this even possible?
> Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated.
>
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Rick
>

[GarethOakes]

Hi Richard,

We have done this for customers before. You can run the print jobs “by hand”, or with a bit of customisation you can integrate the publishing application with the Arbortext Editor GUI, or with your CMS.

The biggest challenge will be writing the stylesheets, if you are publishing only simple manuscripts in a common style then probably not a big deal but you still need to keep that in mind. Most people these days are looking at XSL-FO technology for light print needs. We recently implemented Antenna House Formatter for an Arbortext customer and had a good experience.

// Gareth Oakes
// Chief Architect, GPSL
// www.gpsl.co<">http://www.gpsl.co>

On 11 Oct 2014, at 06:40 , Richard Schoen <-<<a style="COLOR:" blue;=" text-decoration:=" underline&quot;=" target="_BLANK" href="mailto:-">>">mailto:->> wrote:

We are running Arbortext v6.1 M010. We currently don’t have either the Publishing Engine or the full version of Styler. To make a manuscript print out (very lightly formatted; suitable for proofreading), we are currently using a third party, Unix-based typesetting system. We would like to move our printing to Windows since we are now using the Windows version of Arbortext. I was wondering is anyone printing or creating a PS or PDF file from Arbortext and not using the Publishing Engine? Is this even possible? Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated.

Regards,
Rick

[ptc-1908075]

Hi Richard,
As Liz Fraley noted, you can buy a Print Composer license to run on Windows. The license includes the FOSI formatting engine and the APP formatting engine plus the free Styler interface for developing an authoring stylesheet.
The full version of Styler for published output is an extra cost. However, since your documents are very lightly formatted, you don't need that expense because the Print Composer license also includes two complementary interfaces for FOSI development, one of which is designed specifically for newbies. So you should be able to equickly and easily develop a native FOSI stylesheet for print output. To make it as quick and easy as possible, I recommend my FOSI tutorials (fosiexpert.com/tutorials-new.html).
FOSI is Arbortext Editor's native formatting language. It has been in use for two decades and is very stable. More information on FOSI is available at my website atfosiexpert.com/resources.html.
Note that FOSI is easier to learn than XSL-FO and APP. With XSL-FO, you first need to learn XSLT. With native APP, you first need to learn Javascript. The only prerequisite for learning FOSI is experience with document formatting. Programming experience is not needed.
In addition, FOSI formatting provides the fastest output with Arbortext Editor. Native FOSI is faster than XSL-FO and APP. And with the FOSI formatting pass reduction feature, which sounds suitable for your needs, formatting speed can be doubled, tripled, or more. Note that FOSI formatting speed does not depend on the skill of the developer, as with XSL and APP.
With native FOSI, you won't have to buy the full version of Styler or any additional software products. For very light formatting, you probably won't need the services of an outside consultant, especially if my tutorials are utilized. So native FOSI is your most cost-effective choice.
Please let me know any questions you may have.
Good luck!Suzanne Napoleonwww.FOSIexpert.com"WYSIWYG is last-century technology!"

[ptc-5681790]

We recently moved from FOSI to XSL-FO with FOP for publishing to PDF and our production time dropped about 90%. This is on Win64.

[ptc-1908075]

Hi Richard,
As Liz Fraley noted, you can buy a Print Composer license to run on Windows. The license includes the FOSI formatting engine and the APP formatting engine plus the free Styler interface for developing an authoring stylesheet.
Since your documents are very lightly formatted, you don't need to purchase the full version of Styler. The Print Composer license includes two complementary interfaces for FOSI development, one of which is designed specifically for newbies, so you can develop a native FOSI stylesheet for print/PS/PDF output. To make it as quick and easy as possible, I recommend my FOSI tutorials (fosiexpert.com/tutorials-new.html).

FOSI is Arbortext Editor's native formatting language. It has been in use for more than two decades and is very stable. More information on FOSI is available at my website atfosiexpert.com/resources.html.
Note that FOSI is easier to learn than XSL-FO and APP. With XSL-FO, you first need to learn XSLT. With native APP, you first need to learn Javascript. The only prerequisite for learning FOSI is experience with document formatting. Programming experience is not needed.
In addition, FOSI formatting is faster than XSL-FO and APP. With the FOSI formatting pass reduction feature, which sounds suitable for your needs, formatting speed can be doubled, tripled, or more. And FOSI formatting speed does not depend on the skill of the developer, as with XSL and APP.
Native FOSI is your most cost-effective choice as well. With native FOSI, you won't have to buy the full version of Styler or any additional software products. And you probably won't need the services of an outside consultant, especially if my tutorials are utilized.
Please let me know any questions you may have.
Good luck!Suzanne Napoleonwww.FOSIexpert.com"WYSIWYG is last-century technology!"

[ptc-1908075]

Hi Richard,
As Liz Fraley noted, you can buy a Print Composer license to run on Windows. The license includes the FOSI formatting engine and the APP formatting engine plus the free Styler interface for developing an authoring stylesheet.
Since your documents are very lightly formatted, you don't need to purchase the full version of Styler. The Print Composer license includes two complementary interfaces for FOSI development, one of which is designed specifically for newbies, so you can develop a native FOSI stylesheet for print/PS/PDF output. To make it as quick and easy as possible, I recommend my FOSI tutorials (fosiexpert.com/tutorials-new.html).

FOSI is Arbortext Editor's native formatting language. It has been in use for more than two decades and is very stable. More information on FOSI is available at my website atfosiexpert.com/resources.html.
Note that FOSI is easier to learn than XSL-FO and APP. With XSL-FO, you first need to learn XSLT. With native APP, you first need to learn Javascript. The only prerequisite for learning FOSI is experience with document formatting. Programming experience is not needed.
In addition, FOSI formatting is faster than XSL-FO and APP. With the FOSI formatting pass reduction feature, which sounds suitable for your needs, formatting speed can be doubled, tripled, or more. And FOSI formatting speed does not depend on the skill of the developer, as with XSL and APP.
Native FOSI is your most cost-effective choice as well. With native FOSI, you won't have to buy the full version of Styler or any additional software products. And you probably won't need the services of an outside consultant, especially if my tutorials are utilized.
Please let me know any questions you may have.
Good luck!Suzanne Napoleonwww.FOSIexpert.com"WYSIWYG is last-century technology!"

[ptc-1908075]

Hi Richard,
As Liz Fraley noted, you can buy a Print Composer license to run on Windows. The license includes the FOSI formatting engine and the APP formatting engine plus the free Styler interface for developing an authoring stylesheet.
Since your documents are very lightly formatted, you don't need to purchase the full version of Styler. The Print Composer license includes two complementary interfaces for FOSI development, one of which is designed specifically for newbies, so you can develop a native FOSI stylesheet for print/PS/PDF output. To make it as quick and easy as possible, I recommend my FOSI tutorials (fosiexpert.com/tutorials-new.html).

FOSI is Arbortext Editor's native formatting language. It has been in use for more than two decades and is very stable. More information on FOSI is available at my website atfosiexpert.com/resources.html.
Note that FOSI is easier to learn than XSL-FO and APP. With XSL-FO, you first need to learn XSLT. With native APP, you first need to learn Javascript. The only prerequisite for learning FOSI is experience with document formatting. Programming experience is not needed.
In addition, FOSI formatting is faster than XSL-FO and APP. With the FOSI formatting pass reduction feature, which sounds suitable for your needs, formatting speed can be doubled, tripled, or more. And FOSI formatting speed does not depend on the skill of the developer, as with XSL and APP.
Native FOSI is your most cost-effective choice as well. With native FOSI, you won't have to buy the full version of Styler or any additional software products. And you probably won't need the services of an outside consultant, especially if my tutorials are utilized.
Please let me know any questions you may have.
Good luck!Suzanne Napoleonwww.FOSIexpert.com"WYSIWYG is last-century technology!"

[ptc-1908075]

My apologies for the duplicate emails. My mailer has been experiencing "technical difficulties." 😞
Suzanne

[GarethOakes]

Hi Steve,

I'm intrigued by your statement "production time dropped about 90%", does this mean the new process with FOP is faster or slower?

In my experience FOP is a poor choice for XSL-FO publishing because it is slow, has quite a few bugs, and does not correctly nor fully implement the XSL-FO specification. On the other hand it does come at an attractive price point 🙂

// Gareth Oakes
// Chief Architect, GPSL
// www.gpsl.co

[ptc-5681790]

FOP is much faster, what used to take hours is done in minutes. As individual processes the time savings isn't as high but we gain in the ability to run more processes in parallel where we were license bound with Composer. We also find that it is much easier to find someone who knows xslt and xsl-fo than someone who knows FOSI. We may move to a commercial FO engine later, but for our needs (we don't have floats or multi column) FOP is fine. Where we have complexity is in the data where we had to do all sorts of ACL FOSI hooks where we now do those in the XSLT before composition.

That being said, Styler is a nice product if you don't have deep knowledge of the above listed standards and you have limited requirements. But when your formatting requirements are extensive, you quickly find that styler out of the box won't do the job and you have to use the fosi escape hatch and you are back to being human resource/knowledge constrained.

[GarethOakes]

Thanks Steve for your insights, very interesting.

// Gareth Oakes
// Chief Architect, GPSL
// www.gpsl.co

[rschoen]

Thanks, everyone for your thoughtful responses to my query about printing. Curiously, before I posted my question here, I was told (by our Arbortext tech support vendor) that Print Composer is no longer available for Arbortext. Had I not been told that, Print Composer would have been my first choice. We have used Print Composer in the past before we switched from SGML to XML.

Rick

[ptoor]

Hi all-

I'd like to clarify that Print Composer is no longer available for purchase. If you require publishing for a small user base, please contact your Account representative for alternate options.

Pushpinder Toor, SLM Solution Manager

[GregoryMackenzi]

It's kind of a bizarre move, and one I don't understand at all. People need to deliver a product. In my opinion Print Composer should be a standard feature of Arbortext Editor.

[JasonBuss]

This is news to me. Hope our existing licenses are grandfathered through 6 and on.

[ptoor]

Hi-

We still have options for composition, but Print Composer is no longer the model we are selling to deliver this functionality. Please check with your Account representative about options available with Publishing Engine to you.

For customers that currently have Print Composer, they may continue to use it, we are just not offering additional sales any longer. (Although remember, if you are using 6.0 and upgrade to 6.1, you will need to regenerate your Flex licenses.)

Pushpinder Toor, SLM Solution Manager

[kmccain]

I am also surprised at this. I just received a quote for maintenance renewal on some of our Print Composer licenses this week, so decided to double-check with my reseller on this. His reply states "PTC still offers and supports Print Composer and it will still be available after 6.1 for installation".

[ptoor]

Hi Kim-

Correct- it is still supported and you may continue to use it if you have exisiting licenses. I want to make clear that we are no longer offering anynewsales of this module.

As I stated in my previous post:

For customers that currently have Print Composer, they may continue to use it, we are just not offering additional sales any longer. (Although remember, if you are using 6.0 and upgrade to 6.1, you will need to regenerate your Flex licenses.)

In Reply to Kim McCain:

I am also surprised at this. I just received a quote for maintenance renewal on some of our Print Composer licenses this week, so decided to double-check with my reseller on this. His reply states "PTC still offers and supports Print Composer and it will still be available after 6.1 for installation".

Pushpinder Toor, SLM Solution Manager

[RobertWilliams]

So for those of us is smaller shops (< 10 folks) that have been happily using Arbortext Editor standalone with Print Composer for years for PDF output, what are our options? We were considering buying 2-4 more seats this year - this will kill that without Print Composer. Oxygen instead? Options?

[aneder]

Hello Bob,



Arbortext Styler includes Print Composer functionality. It is more
expensive than Composer, but it is sufficiently chipper than Print Server,
about $6000K.



Sincerely,

Alexander

[jgroves]

So the question becomes "How long will V6.1 be supported?" also "So when
V6.1 is not supported, I take it that then we are forced into PE or whatever
the greatest tool is at the time?"



John T Groves
W R Systems, LTD.
2500 Almeda Ave
Suite 214
Norfolk, VA 23513-2403
e-mail <">mailto:jgroves@wrsystems.com> jgroves@wrsystems.com
Ph. 757.858.6000 ext 442

[ptc-953343]

It will all depend upon your needs. What styling language are you using? If you have to use Foss then arbor text is about the only option. If you can use xylophone then you have many options that are not dependent upon the editor that you use.


Sent on a Sprint Samsung Galaxy Note® II

[RobertWilliams]

Sorry if it seems a dumb response, but I really don't know "What styling language are you using?"

They (gov't) use Arbortext, but are so large that they use the Arbortext Print Server - cost prohibitive for us (believe they're also moving to a content mngmnt system as part of their setup - but again, they're large... we're tiny.)

We don't 'style' or do ACL, or any other serious or heavyweight XML/XSL stuff here. Frankly, that's all pretty expensive perishable knowledge to gain and then hold, if it's not used daily/weekly, ya? Tho' there are some folks here who fancy themselves as 'stylin'.... but I digress.

At this point, looks like the $6K Styler will likely be our only realistic option going forward (particularly in light of the low number of seats here (again, <10).

Thanks again for the insights.

Bob W. Bristol RI, US

[ablackmon]

Hi Bob,

What did you end up using to improve your Arbortext to print output? I work tech pubs for a small business in AL and we are having issues with some things when docs are converted to pdf. The method we use is file, print preview (at which time Arbortext reads the stylesheet (MIL-STD-2361D XSL-FO (xslfo-main-v5_0.xsl)).  The main issue I'm having is a very ugly TOC.  I cannot figure out how to adjust long wp titles so that they will wrap, rather than slamming into the wp number.  In addition to that, when it does drop to the second line there is no indenture. It looks REALLY bad w/everything left aligned.  I've been banging my head for days, while trying to find some piece of something that would help in these forums.  After much reading, it seems that the issues you posted in 2014 most closely resemble what I'm up against.

What I'm trying to figure out is, do we need some sort of additional software, ie print composer, to "fix" the formatting issues.  As you know, there is very little we can do to change the stylesheet and still validate our manuals.  I'm wondering if we are missing some magical software that will help us produce a decent looking document.

Any and all input would be much appreciated.

AP

Huntsville, AL

[ptc-953343]

Most of the mils peculiar I've run into require FOSI. If they use xslfo then you can get a number of different engines.


Sent on a Sprint Samsung Galaxy Note® II

[thendricks]

We’ve had good luck with RenderX. Thought be conscious of some variations in rendering engines. I believe the server side RenderX engine is about half of what you are looking at otherwise.

~Trevor Hendricks

[LynnHales]

The loss of Print Composer will be a major blow to Epic sales to small
business or like me the occasional independent contractor. But then we all
know PTC's feelings about Epic. L



Lynn

[ptoor]

Hi all-

So I think there are somearound what I am communicating about Print Composer. I did not say it would stop being supported after 6.1. What I did want to make people aware of was that if they were stil on 6.0 and planning on moving to 6.1, they would have to generate new license keys because of how the new Flex licensing works. That new license will STILL allow you access to Print Composer if you have purchased it.

One more time:

• 
  
• being retired
• 
  
• Has nothing to do with 6.1’s end of life (which we have not determined any date for yet).
• 
  
• sales.
• 
  
• If anyone has other questions or concerns, feel free to reach out to me directly, I'm happy to help and address your issues.
  
  
  
  

  Pushpinder Toor, SLM Solution Manager

[ajordin]

Hi Pushpinder

Why can't you just come out and say what these options are, rather than sending us off to resellers?
You opened this can of worms on a public forum, please be good enough to answer it on a public forum....

This isn't the first time PTC have said they aren't going to sell any new Print Composers, yet the demand is still there.
I have never understood the reasons for not pushing it, it is a good fit for many smaller businesses.

I need to know up front what the low-cost alternatives are that I can recommend to my customers and what I need to develop my applications for.

Adrian Jordin - Senior Consultant
Mekon Ltd.
intelligent content solutions
e adrian.jordin@mekon.com<|">mailto:adrian.jordin@mekon.com>| t +44 (0)117 303 5202 | m +44 (0)7515294338| w www.aerospace-defence.com<">http://www.aerospace-defence.com>

Todays content needs agility - www.congility.com