More than meets the eye

I've been working recently on a series of XSLT conversions for a big XML data set, and I'm really impressed with the stuff you can pull with that.

The job's been to take a whole load of bibliographic information from the backend of a publishing system and convert it to something which can be brought into a design package to quickly put together a catalogue. Of course, nothing is as easy as it should be, and there are a lot of little hurdles to this which - a year or so ago - would have had me running off, tail between my legs. (Actually - it *did* have me running away from the problem: I did try to write something to solve this, and entirely failed!)

But now, with a bit more thought and general XML experience, I've managed to find ways to get around all those problems, and now the biggest problem we've got is that there's a certain amount of inconsistency in the data itself. (It was all imported from some other system, and some of the data there is well over fifteen years old. And wrong.)

Generally, though, I'm amazed at the power of XSL stylesheets and what they can do to a piece of XML. Pretty much anything, really. You can even create functions within the stylesheet like any other kind of language, which is incredibly useful.

However, there are some caveats. (There always are.)

Now, as with many things, there are different versions of the stylesheet implementaton, and they come with different functionalities. Sadly, the design package in use (InDesign), will only support version 1.0. Which is a shame, because all the really cool features (the functions mentioned above, and some of the date/time function as well) only came in in version 2.

However, if you've got a bunch of data in XML format and need to repurpose it for something a little different, I'd recommend checking out the possibilities of XSLT. There are plenty of free tools available and it's not too hard to get the head round it. And it might just open up a whole new purpose to your data - or in this case, save a whole rakeload of time. And those are two very noble purposes.

I have never done this

In all my time working at P&C, I never made this mistake.*

I did make a few others, though, and I'm well aware of that sinking feeling that Mr. Brooker describes so well. It is pretty easy to do, though. You can have comfortably five or six different proof versions, from the first proofs through to the final to-the-press proofs, and even then it's possible to have someone be looking through the book at the last minute and discover that you've spelled the author's name wrong on the title page (it's happened!), so your file of "Final, final, no really final, book.pdf" is suddenly invalidated.

Actually, an entertaining part of this story has been the blame game going since Friday, as each of the parties involved tries to point the finger at someone else.
- Franzen himself initially blamed the printers: "They printed the wrong file."
- The printers (qutie fairly) pointed out that "we only printed the one file we got given guv'nor - and we're not responsible for the content". They blamed the publisher.
- The publisher, on receipt of this hot potato, smoothly and immediately tossed it across to the typesetters: "The typesetter passed the incorrect version of the text to the printer. It's nothing to do with us."

At this point, my sense of professionalism kicks in. At no point should the Production Manager ever sign off on something he's not seen. You don't just get a phone call from an outsourcing company saying "We've done the work, OK?" and say "Sure, good job guys, bung it over to the printer and tell them to run off a cool 80,000 copies, right?" instead of getting the file back, checking it, and passing it to the printer personally. And you know what? If you do, you deserve something like this to come and bit you in the arse. No matter who ends up copping the blame in the media, there is a Production Manager over at HarperCollins who will be feeling the burning glare of a thousand angry supervisors for the next wee while.

*: One of my first assistants did, though, but fortunately the mistake was deemed insufficiently awful for the book to be pulped. Thank goodness.