Our regular readers have already started commenting on it. For a couple of days now, there has been a new function on our blog, which allows you to download each post in PDF form, or to select a number of posts and combine them in a single PDF file.
Cross Media Publishing
One reason for this is that we're always looking for convincing demos and showcases. And since a lot of the materials our customers create are sensitive, we have to create our own demos. The focus of the current one is cross media publishing. A single database exists in the DMP FLO Suite (yes, we use our own content management system to host our website), and it is used in different types of output. On one side it is visualized in the website itself. But we use the same data to create an RSS feed. And now we also use it to populate and InDesign Server template, which can be used for reading or printing. In a later phase we might even turn it into a true web2print solution, and allow you to order prints with a selection of the blogs.
InDesign Server
The blog2print concept uses InDesign Server templates created by one of our prepress experts. Individual items in the database (title, introduction, body text, images, ...) already existed for the website, and were used without any changes. Of course sometimes the structure of a database needs to be slightly altered if you're considering cross media publishing.
We choose for InDesign Server in this case because of the typograhpic capabilities, but also because we might need InDesign Packages for future projects. In that case, the blogs can be entered into the InDesign template, and a package can be delivered to the studio. They can then change the layout as needed for whatever is relevant at that time. This way, we don't have to create templates for one-time-only campaigns, and the database publishing can have a much .
Making the blog easier to read
And of course all of this has another positive side effect. Acutally the reason that I started the initiative: it makes the blog more accessible. We've been posting a lot lately, and in a few months time the blog turned into a quite respectable archive of FLO Suite possibilities and functionalities. But all of this information is useless if it is not used. And personally, I would never read dozens of articles on a html page or even on a screen. By allowing you to download the information in PDF files (with the possibility of printing it in a nice layout), we're making it easier for people just discovering the FLO Suite (or just discovering the blog) to catch up with old posts.
Not the first
Of course we're not the first to develop this principle (although we're probably the first to overkill it with an InDesign Server in the background). After Googling for "blog2print", I quickly found an existing service for the Google bloggers. And even more: I got the original idea from a new initiative in the USA, where printed newspapers with local content were going to be published with mostly blogs as the source of content.