Publishing Engine vs. Styler?

[jhull]

Hello all, We're getting ready to purchase our setup and I'm wondering whether we need only one or both of the products.  I understand that Styler locks your system up while it's working whereas PE does not (runs in background?).  Any insight?  Thanks!

[GarethOakes]

Arbortext Styler is a desktop product, intended for creating and managing the stylesheets used for various published outputs (print, web, etc.). Styler is operated via a GUI.

Arbortext Publishing Engine is a server product, intended to service small-to-large workgroups of users who require documents to be published. Publishing Engine has a GUI for admin usage, but is designed to be operated either via an Arbortext Editor users, or as a web service (HTTP/SOAP) e.g. plugged into a CMS.

So Styler is locked to a single user's desktop, whereas Publishing Engine can service multiple users.

Does that help?

[jhull]

Thanks for the very informative answer Gareth!  May I ask a follow up?

What is the difference in output (pdf, specifically) between the two?  Will the pdf output for Styler be full functional, to include hyperlinks, tagging if necessary?  Is Styler efficient in system resources?  It takes me less than 20 minutes to convert a ~600 page Word doc to pdf using Acrobat 9 Pro.  Could we expect similar or better performance from Styler to output a 600 page doc?

PDF will likely be our primary output, and we're wondering if PE might be overkill for our needs.

I really appreciate the insight!

Jim.

[GarethOakes]

Hi Jim,

From a quality perspective, the PDF output from Styler and PE will be identical. They both use the same PDF components to generate the output.

If you are only looking at a single user environment then I guess Styler may suit your needs better. If you have a team then PE may suit your needs better, particularly as you are interested in performance. If everyone is working on laptops then they are not going to create PDF as fast as if you are publishing on a proper server.

One idea that may help: you could organise an Evaluation copy of the software to see how that works for you. If you ask nicely, PTC or your PTC representative may be able to offer a 30-day trial license for this purpose.

-Gareth