River Valley cuts the cost of typesetting by half

Published by Kaveh on

London, UK, 2 December, 2014 – River Valley Technologies, the 25 year old UK-based typesetting company is set to cut production costs and turn around times by half for publishers, by using its new RVPublisher platform. The system is a “pure” XML based end-to-end collaborative authoring and composition solution, comprising several modules that link seamlessly.

River Valley’s system includes a user friendly collaborative authoring environment that saves all content natively in XML. Subsequent stages such as peer review, copy editing and proof correction are all carried out directly on the XML file using a user-friendly WYSIWYG interface. An integrated version control system keeps track of the complete editing history.

The rendering module within RVPublisher allows for the manuscript to be instantly published as HTML, PDF and Epub at any stage in the process, e.g. directly upon submission as a preprint, upon acceptance, or immediately after proof correction. The automatically generated PDF can be a standard one, or one of of River Valley’s unique “Smart PDFs” allowing optional information to appear when the user hovers the mouse over relevant links.

River Valley’s 500 man-years’ experience with handling mathematics has been incorporated into RVPublisher in order to ensure that it is a comfortable environment even for authors writing mathematics. Authors can enter math content either by using LaTeX commands, or by using a WYSIWYG interface. In the XML file, the mathematics is then seamlessly converted to MathML, using sophisticated conversion filters which can even encode subtle math spacing. Complex math constructs that have no MathML equivalent are automatically detected and saved in the native LaTeX format. Graphics are saved in the most appropriate form, and only downsampled when required. Vector images remain as vector throughout the process and are not “rasterized”.

The content can be exported as XML at any point in the process. The XML can be written to conform to any DTD, e.g. JATS, and can be ingested directly into most typesetters’ pagination system. In addition, the system can generate LaTeX files, conforming to any of a number of publisher “class files”. This allows authors to submit LaTeX files to journals, without using any LaTeX coding.

More and more publishers are looking to reduce publication turn-around times and even to move to “instant” publishing. RVPublisher will allow them to do this without compromising quality and without a need to change suppliers.

River Valley has already been using some of the modules of RVPublisher internally to deliver work for its current clients.

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