Document Composer

The Need

The production of documents for both customers and internal use has historically always been a problem.

Information usually needs to be collated from a number of different sources and then assembled using a Word Processor or Desk Top Publishing System. Quite often some of the information is in a format not suitable for the chosen System and needs to be pasted or scanned into the document.

Quality reviews of these documents then tend to focus on the obvious errors related to layout, spelling, punctuation, etc. rather than looking at the content of the information.

Finally, just before the document is due to be published a change is identified and made in the document. This may be fundamental change to the system which should but unfortunately usually is not followed through to the information source which becomes incorrect and out of date.

Cradle Document Composer helps resolve these problems.

The Solution

Cradle Document Composer allows an author to design, structure and formally review a document independently of the actual information content of that report. The information used within the report is extracted from the Cradle database and as such is subject to its own formal review and approval procedure.

There are three inputs to a document:

• The Document Structure Diagram determines the structure of the document. It identifies the chapters, sections, and sub-sections within the document including things like Prefaces, Glossaries, and Contents Lists. This structure may be a hierarchical.
• The Document Template describes the layout of a specific information type on the page. This information may be textual, or graphical. Any information contained within the Cradle database may be incorporated in a document. Irrespective of the source or application that manages it.
• The Document Diagrams Definition identifies the specific information to be included within the document. [This could be considered to be some sort of database enquiry analogous to an SQL query.]

Having designed and produced this document it can be formally reviewed as a separate process from the review of the information.

When both have been approved the Document Printer can then be used to produce a final printed copy of the document containing the up to date approved information within the database.

Standard Document layouts may be defined and templates created to internal company standards or external standards to which the company must conform. Once defined these templates can be replicated and used across whichever projects are appropriate.

There is no need to output the data to a Desk Top Publishing System or Word Processor. However, for those customers requiring it this output may be linked to external packages such as Word, FrameMaker, and Interleaf.

Cradle comes preconfigured with the ability to produce over two thousand different report variants.

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