Arbortext PTC/User Blog

“All about Arbortext Advanced Print Publisher”
Presented by Lawrie Stevens, Global Publishing Solutions

For the first time in probably 5 years, APP (formerly 3B2) got center stage as Lawrie Stevens performed a demo — all live, nothing canned — that not only put the product through it’s paces but really showed what it can do. As with all live demos, technology can get the best of you at times, but GPSL always does things live. This way the product can really exhibit itself.

Those of us in attendance were treated to a spectacular exhibit:  APP is a fast, flexible, highly capable production engine.  By the end of the presentation, we were all left wondering: where has Arbortext and PTC been hiding this product? And, when will 5.4 be out so we can play with it?

As moderator, I gathered up the questions asked during the presentation and have reproduced them here. Answers were provided and reviewed by Lawrie before posting.

And, by the way, Arbortext 5.4 was released today.  Enjoy!

Questions and Answers

Q: Does APP guarantee page integrity?

Lawrie: Yes – we can `guarantee’ page integrity in an environment like Boeing (depends, of course, on the integrity / design of the whole solution). As I showed, we are able to take care of LOEP, changes and printing changes (leafs) rather than using external pre-processing. The integrity of pages was a `must have’ and we would not have achieved acceptance without it.

Q: Is the right hand pane searchable?

Lawrie: Yes. The Edit Area (yellow bar) is searchable with simple or regular expression mode (search & replace too). This is also scriptable.

Q: Can I search with xpath?

Lawrie: Yes, using scripts and other tools

Q: Has it been integrated into Styler yet?

Lawrie: APP is integrated with Styler in 5.4 release

Q: Does APP support HAT (Hebrew, Arabic and Thai)?

Lawrie: Yes – As seen. [*]  Thai is a particular language and does present certain challenges. All other languages are fully supported – Arabic, Hebrew and all the major non-Latin languages have been in the system since about 1990. CJK was added in the late 90’s.

[* Ed note: Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and Greek were all demonstrated live.]

Q: How many pages per minute can APP do?

Lawrie: APP/3B2 is fast. Format/print speed depend on the complexity of the incoming XML and also the complexity of the output eg. complex tables breaking over pages (horiz and vert) can affect formatting speed). Certainly for a well-constructed template the publishing speed far exceeds FOSI

[Ed note:  APP has a counter visible in the bottom window pane, one boeing doc of nearly 1200 pages was processed at a speed of 130,000 pages per hour. That's right. 130,000.]

Q: If you’ve got data that is deeply nested, complicated xml, does this slow it down?

Lawrie:  “No”!  The XML depth will not slow us down. Although 3B2 has a plethora of XML/XPath tools, it also has an underlying logic set which enables us to remove the tree mode where we use simple format counters instead of the XML hierarchy.

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Tags: 3B2, Arbortext Advanced Print Publisher, meetings, PTC/User

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 1:10 am and is filed under meetings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.