We're talking with Grady Cooper, director of systems management at the Alameda Newspaper Group, which publishes six titles here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Cooper has developed a system to archive display ads from his newspapers using the Adobe Acrobat technology.
Once you've turned a page into PDF, indexed it and put it on a CD-ROM, how do you get an ad off the page to work on it again?
Part of the beauty of PDF is that it is just a different version of PostScript. Adobe has developed a "plug-in" for its Illustrator 5.5 drawing package that will allow you to open a PDF file (Macromedia FreeHand has a similar plug-in available and Transverter Pro from TechPool Software of Cincinnati also opens PDF files).
Cooper says the process of recreating the ad is relatively simple: search for the ad number in Acrobat Exchange and once the page is found, open it in Illustrator.
Then crop the ad out and save it in the Illustrator format, where it can be handled in a normal fashion (images are dropped into a folder or directory as EPS files in the Photoshop format, so they too can be manipulated as necessary).
The next step in the process will be to buy some sort of system that will support large numbers of CD-ROMs on-line at the same time. "The technology is out there and it's just a matter of doing the research and making the right choice," said Cooper.
And once multiple CD-ROMs are mounted on the network, anyone with the Exchange software can do a sophisticated search and anyone with the free Reader software can do a "find" (similar to the "find" command in a word processor).
Much as he did with the editorial front-end and pagination, Cooper has taken some core components from a number of suppliers and custom-built a system.
Certainly a key missing element is the page renaming function, but since Cooper has had numerous inquiries about his process from existing Harris customers, that problem probably will be addressed soon.
The bottom line here is that because the Alameda Newspaper Group handles all of its pages in PostScript, it has inexpensively -- Cooper said the whole thing "cost less than $10,000" -- developed a display ad archiving system that with a little tweaking will be a fully functional editorial library system.
Missing from Cooper's setup are the niceties that traditional electronic libraries provide: the attachment of additional terms (known as keywords) and the identification of elements (byline, headline, dateline, etc.).
Cooper postulates that such element flagging could be easily handled by embedding these codes (maybe in Standardized Generalized Markup Language?) into the pagination system's typesetting formats and setting them as "white type," making them invisible on the printed page but available for indexing in the PDF file.
Another problem is that Acrobat Search deals with whole pages. If you type "Clinton and Dole" into a search prompt, the system will retrieve all instances of those two words on the same page, not necessarily in the same story.
But for the base cost of a system such as this, a newspaper could invest quite a bit of money in programming to overcome these shortcomings and still come out far ahead.
Onward.
\dmc
[THE COLE DIGEST is written by consultant David M. Cole, editor and publisher of the industry newsletter THE COLE PAPERS. The DIGEST is made available to PressLink subscribers every Wednesday at no extra charge. Send comments by e-mail to cole@plink.geis.com. The COLE DIGEST is the property of The Cole Group, a California sole proprietorship. Reproduction in whole or in part without the written permission of The Cole Group is prohibited. Copyright (C) 1996, The Cole Group. Opinions expressed are those of The Cole Group, unless otherwise noted.
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