What is delivered to us: Electronic files, e.g. TeX, Word, graphics, multimedia.

What we do to the files: Copy edit, check style for math, references, clean up or generate graphics, etc.

What we deliver: XML/MathML, PDF, rich PDF, HTML, and whatever else the client requires.

What makes us unique: We generate PDFs fully automatically from XML/MathML.

XML–first — our toughest challenge

Publishers rightly demand both PDF and XML from suppliers – PDF for ‘now’, and XML for the future. A problem with XML is that it is very difficult to check for content, because it cannot be easily ‘proofread’ like a PDF file. So it is imperative that when we generate the XML, we can guarantee precise fidelity with the PDF.

Some ten years ago we decided that the only reliable way was to produce the PDF directly and automatically from the XML. This way, checking the PDF would be equivalent to checking the XML. We knew this would be hard, but it proved even harder than we thought, especially with heavy mathematics. But we did it, and now every single page of PDF that we produce, even for the first proof, is generated 100% automatically from the XML file – a true ‘XML-first’ workflow. We believe we are the only company on the planet with this technology for complex text. We have yet to check other planets of course.

Watch a video presentation showing our workflow:

Our XML-first technology is ideally suited to rendering ePub on the fly, and we are working hard to implement it. Our strategy is to use TeX as the rendering engine. As part of this programme, we recently succeeded in porting TeX to the iPhone.

And the iPad is going to make things even more exciting…

See a short and a longer presentation regarding our work on eBooks.

In December 2009 Kaveh gave a presentation on ePub at the STM Innovations seminar in London.

Information is not just about text. It could be in the form of video, audio, animation, or a combination of all.

The multimedia extension to XML, namely ‘SMIL’, allows any media, e.g. text, video and audio, to be held in one document, with all the reusability advantages of XML. We are working towards a scenario where a publication can be any or any combination of these media. For instance a PDF file might have an audio button next to an equation, in order to clarify that equation.

Our multimedia department has recorded hundreds of academic presentations at conferences. These can be seen at www.river-valley.tv.

We host a development portal for free/open source software projects at sarovar.org… More »